Spam and the Fortune 1000

There is an interesting article on the Register about bots in large company networks. I always assumed that the massive bot armies of spammers and phishers consisted of the PCs of unsophisticated home users. I think this has tremendous implications. If you're PayPal and Oracle is sending PayPal spam, can you do something about it? Yes, I think.

We also turned to Randal Vaughn, a professor of information systems at Baylor University and a specialist in tracking and shutting down sources of spam. He said the data "implies the mail does indeed correspond to internal generation [from the companies] and indicates bot infections inside the perimeter. This is not at all a warm fuzzy feeling about the state of internet security."

Wesson concurs. "If all these Fortune 1000 companies can have bots running on their systems," he says, "what do you think is happening to government [systems] in Kansas and Mississippi?"