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Spam and phishing infestation is not restricted to home users’ poorly protected computers running Windows. Common wisdom says these are making a reap harvest for the malicious code writers. Yet a recent study published by The Register indicates that corporate America is another victim of this phenomenon. Zombie machines inside Oracle’s or HP’s networks were noticed spreading spam. “Oracle was found to have a machine pushing out a PayPal phishing scam, and BestBuy had a system sending thousands of spams a month“.

Your small business will fail victim the same way if you’re gonna keep ignoring network security (actually you’re already trapped). Supposing you’ve read the entire referred article above, let’s repeat its conclusion here:

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?”

Blaming the ’server’ is not going to help your office out of spam. What you need to understand is that -most likely- the computer you’re working on day in and day out harbors malicious programs, very well hidden beneath. Your machine could be a zombie feeding and spewing junk all over the internet.

There are solutions to this, nothing to the degree of stopping the pests completely (unless you physically disconnect the zombies off the web). It just takes to stop blaming everyone outside for ’spamming me’ and to turn looking inside the ‘perimeter’ where some of the most interesting answers are to be found. For instance:

- What OS runs on your local servers?

- What OS runs on your workstations and laptops?

- How’s doing your Port 25?

- Have your users been taught about basic network security rules?

- Do they listen and follow?

China and similar botnet fiefdoms may not have identical moral problems with this situation (to say the least), but that’s not the case with America. Sadly, my experience is telling me that things won’t change for the better so far business users won’t trust reason above instinct.

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