All you zombies hide your faces
All you people in the street
All you sittin’ in high places
The pieces gonna fall on you
– “All You Zombies”, Hooters (1985)
One of the more interesting quasi-economic developments in the world of spam, security, etc., is the rise of PC zombie farms to which you can rent access. While their existence has been documented, CipherTrust has the first realtime zombie-tracker that I’ve seen.
According to the company, it has identified an average of 172,000 zombies every day so far this month. Asumming that’s true, the company will have found roughly the population of Canada in zombies by the end of next month. Hmmm, now there is an interesting thought.
Related posts:
I was recently speaking with the CTO at a large service provider. He said that one of their greatest concerns today is zombie hosts using the ISP’s own outgoing mail servers to send spam, viruses, and phishing attacks. This is a grave concern for ISPs because, by becoming a source of junk mail themselves, their reputation is put at risk, leading to poorer delivery rates for their customers.
The solutions unfortunately are not cheap — especially for larger ISPs. You can either content filter all outgoing mail, filter out the spam, and risk losing legitimate mail from your own customers. Or, you can use traffic shaping to cut down the flow from individual hosts.
But neither solution is perfect, and both are very costly to deploy.