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Thursday, March 4, 2004

Comcast Finally Takes Action Against Zombie Machines

 Cool, I wish they would have done this ages ago.  I just talked with a friend, who will remain nameless in order to keep him as a friend, who had virus protection installed…  With definition files dated in 2002!  He has promised to get updated by Sunday. J

 

But seriously, something must be done.  So many people out there are still running Windows 95 or Windows XP with out any kind of protection.  Add to that the ever growing broadband availability and you are just begging to have someone hack into your machine.  There has to be a way to get and keep machines clean short of turning them off….

 

 

<snip>

Just last week, we pointed to a story saying that 30% of all spam came from "zombie" machines (home users whose machines were infected by a trojan horse used to send out spam). At the time, we wondered why the various broadband service providers weren't doing anything to deal with this issue. Now, it looks like Comcast has finally realized that maybe they should be doing something and have started sending letters to users who have been found with machines sending spam. Of course, some users are saying that they solved the problem a month ago, and are still receiving the letters. Also, according to Broadband Reports, in some cases it appears that Comcast should have acted ages ago - such as with five specific IP addresses that were shown to be responsible for over 45,000 spam messages.


[Techdirt]

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