Morgalyn's Journal: Microsoft's Vigilante Investigation of Zombies

According to this article at Information Week, Microsoft has decided to fight zombie-launched spam in their own way. In conjunction with the FTC and consumer rights groups, Microsoft set up a clean computer and then infected it. They monitored the 'zombie' over the course of 20 days - "In those 20 days, this one computer received 5 million connection requests from spammers, and sent 18 million spam messages". This whole operation has lead to the (partial) identification of 13 different spamming groups, some of which reside in the US and may be prosecuted under the CAN-SPAM act. All this leaves me thinking that, for the recipients of those 18 million spam messages, they really could blame M'soft for all their spam! Is becoming part of the problem an appropriate approach to becoming part of the solution?

But it is all in the name of antispammination

[nizo]

I am guessing they are safe since they were doing it in conjunction with the FTC. If this leads to huge cut in the amount of spam polluting the net I think it will be more than worth it. Thanks for pointing out the interesting article :-)

Re:But it is all in the name of antispammination

[Morgalyn]

You're welcome for the article. I decided to cross post anything I submit as a story to my journal, both for remembering what I submitted and to compare to the 'edited' content if the story does get posted. It's fun to see that Zonk actually edited that post :)