Want one more good reason to have a firewall, good antivirus software, and a properly paranoid attitude about security? The New York Times, in an article entitled Hackers Steal From Pirates, to No Good End, confirms what I’ve been saying for a while: The latest round of viruses and worms were specifically designed to hijack computers and dragoon them into an army of spam servers.
“…at least a third of all spam circulating on the Internet is now sent from or relayed by personal home computers that have been taken over, said Jesse Dougherty, director of development at Sophos, an antivirus and antispam company.”