Spam: Vatican does not leave!

In a report analyzing the current situation of spam distribution in the world today, security firm Sophos has identified at least one "zombie" computer with IP address in the Vatican.

Source: Security Labs Zombie is the term for computers that have been controlled by hackers. They can force your computer to perform tasks such as sending spam, participating in denial of service attacks . without users' knowledge.

Many zombie computers form a network called a botnet and this is the culprit for the transmission of spam. Often hackers use Trojan, worm and virus programs to attack a user's computer, thereby taking control of the system step by step.

Spam spreads by these botnets often have legitimate IP addresses, so filters are difficult to detect.

In the Sophos report, the US still stands at the "Spam King" position with 23.2% of the world's total spam. The main runner-up is China (including Hong Kong) and South Korea - because the number of broadband users in this Northeast Asian country is very high.

The report author - Graham Cluley warns that the situation will not improve as long as family Internet users have not taken action to protect their computers.

Meanwhile, observers believe that part of the error also belongs to the security industry itself. Why is that? For example, the latest anti-virus version of F-Secure was not compatible with the ZoneAlarm firewall, forcing users to switch to the Internet Connection firewall in Windows XP SP2.

Thien Y