Comcast Is Spam King. C/Net reports that Comcast's high-speed Internet subscribers are the biggest spammer on the Internet. In a politically incorrect moment of truth-telling, Comcast network engineer, Sean Lutner reportedly told an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week, that Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company's official servers. Almost all of the remaining 700 million represent spam erupting from so-called zombie computers.
Zombie computers arise when spammers seize on bugs in Microsoft Windows–or from naive users who click on attachments–to take over PCs and transform them into spambots. Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company's official servers.
No hard numbers exist, says C/Net, but some estimates say that about one-third of spam comes from zombie computers with broadband connections. The owners of the zombie PCs typically don't even notice what's happening. [Daily Wireless]