Spam is toxic...

Why spam isn't going away soon
Recently, Symantec said in its February 2008 State of Spam report that 78.5 percent of all e-mail is spam. They also said most of that is now coming from Europe. That's a change from previous reports that had suggested servers in North America were responsible. What the Symantec report doesn't explicitly state is that much of the European spam doesn't come from individuals sitting at their desk pumping out lists. Europe is one of the hotbeds for the Storm worm botnet, notorious for automatically co-opting its victims into spam relays. For example, with the release of a Valentine's Day theme-spam barrage in early February, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks estimated that Storm has grown by as much as 50 percent in new infections. More ominous, Nazario says "the fact (Storm) is generating lots of money means that it's in (the creator's) interests to keep grooming it, keep growing it." Worse Storm isn't the only big, bad botnet in town. Read more