South Korean authorities reportedly have arrested a man suspected of running network of 16,000 zombie computers to send 18 million spam e-mails to 133 countries a day.
Internet security firm Sophos rates South Korea as the third biggest source of spam worldwide. Anti-spam group Spamhaus.org rates it as the seventh.
“Spammers usually don’t use their own computers to send out their unwanted messages. Instead they infect and take over innocent people’s vulnerable computers using malware and use them to churn out the spam,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “South Korean computers are often exploited in this way by spammers because of the country's impressive Internet infrastructure, but the messages sent from those computers can end up in the inboxes of people anywhere in the world. For the Koreans to catch their first zombie master is great news for everybody who uses the Internet.”
Zombie master: Isn’t that what we call anyone who convinces Utah or Michigan state legislators to pass an e-mail-related law?
