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Attack of Comcast's Internet zombies
May 24, 2004, 4:00 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh

Comcast's high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be 
an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail.

Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. "We're the biggest spammer on 
the Internet," network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an 
antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week.

Lutner said 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--a breathtaking figure that adds up to six or seven 
spam-o-grams for each American family every day.

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, 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.

Because home computers are more likely to be infected than business PCs, 
and because Comcast has about 6 million high-speed customers, it may 
have been inevitable that the cable provider became a haven for 
remote-controlled zombies that churn out junk e-mail.

Lutner pointed to IronPort Systems' statistics for comcast.net. It shows 
that while the company's six official mail servers have a monthly 
outgoing e-mail index of 6.2, there are at least 44 Comcast subscribers 
with similar scores of 5.8 or higher. Overall, Comcast is the single 
biggest source of all types of e-mail, with a higher volume than the 
next two, Time Warner's Road Runner and Yahoo, combined

[...remainder snipped...]

Posted by Declan McCullagh on May 25, 2004

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