Sending 10,000 spam emails a minute

Earlier in the week I talked about the biggest security worry home users should have is that their systems can be hijacked, taken over, and used as a zombie to blindly send out spam emails. I had no idea how many a standard home DSL setup could handle, but learned from this article that it’s huge. ”Today, the biggest problem is “zombie” computers that have been hijacked by trojans, viruses, or other badness to do various nefarious tasks without the owners’ knowledge. A very popular nefarious task is–surprise!–spamming. On a regular DSL connection, a regular PC can attempt to deliver up to 10,000 messages per minute.^[source] The zombie machine goes down its list of addresses, tries to connect to the mailserver associated with the next address, and if connects, it delivers the message. If it doesn’t connect, it just goes down the list.”

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