[camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project

[Eric S. Johansson]

Alan Brown wrote:

> They are currently tracking around 1.5 million compromised machines.

*ouch*.  on 24x7 both power and connectivity?

> The Swen and blaster worms install various spamware and backdoors. These
> have been estimated to have infected millions of machines worldwide and
> later versions removed characteristics which removed tellltale
> compromise signs when scanned - now they mostly "phone home", instead of
> listening for commands.

and nobody has noticed.  That's mine bogglingly astounding.  A friend of 
mine just bought an XP machine and insisted on grabbing updates herself 
over her modem.  yes, she has soft firewalls and virus protection in 
place but I'm willing to bet she's one of the compromised now so I 
should probably investigate detection/removal tools.

you do need to give Microsoft credit, after all, they are the world 
leader in zombie friendly software.  I figured they probably have at 
least a three-year head start over Linux in this arena.

> The pool of infected machines is huge. I just hope you're right about
> the CPUs burning up - it doesn't happen when machines are running OGR
> calculations, so I suspect that you just ran into a particularly badly
> built example.

no, it was a stock Intel motherboard, CPU, CPU fan in a standard (i.e. 
not cheap) case with reasonably sized power supply (i.e. 300 watts).  It 
has the standard number of fans.

I think this makes it even more imperative to develop the kit ability of 
dynamically increasing postage process based on what your peers say.

what a way to start the new year.  ;-)  Alan, I do appreciate you 
carrying the message as it were.

---eric

-- 
Speech recognition in use.  Incorrect endings, words, and case is
closer than it appears