The connection between Spam and Viruses
After comparing MANY of these delivery failures (a fraction of what has gone out with my domain name forged I’m afraid…) They are all advertising essentially the same site (sometimes different gateways to it, but I’ve traced it all back to a close group of domains that have been unresponsive to abuse reports online….) Anyway, it appears that the machines used to send these junk mails come from all over the place, Chartermi.net, optonline.com, aol.com, kyu.edu, rogerscable.com, etc. etc… I can only conclude after this analysis that there is a network of Zombied machines doing a certain spammers bidding. I’ve mentioned in the past the importance of updating your antivirus software. Now more than ever it should be evident that EVERYONE (especially you Windows users) need to be running current antivirus software. Enable your firewall to prevent incoming connections and learn enough about your machine to notice anything suspicious. (Such as my antivirus doesn’t seem to be running, etc…) From what I’ve read in the newsgroups and other places online, there are several viruses lately that have been used as spam networks and there seems to be a growing convergence between spammers and virus writers.