Installers, Engineers and Technicians

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Male enhancement, weight loss, teeth whiteners... If you are infected and part of a botnet, a collection of PCs compromised with a virus that gives control to a remote computer, you may be sending out SPAM on someone else's behalf.

Here is what ZDnet researchers found after watching a few small botnets. 

"These small botnets are also exclusively used for some of the
sophisticated managed spam services currently offered on the
underground marketplace. For instance, the managed spamming service
exclusivelly profiled by Zero Day last year, was using only 5000
infected hosts for the purpose of sending 1 million spam messages.
Another variation of it was offering only 1672 infected hosts, and was
still capable of spamming 3215 emails per minute."

ISPs enforce SPAM policies and will often shut your internet access off if a large volume of SPAM is being reported from your IP address. This could mean a home user getting their internet access disabled, or even could shut down an entire business if the threats aren't removed. 

Just another compelling reason to run a trustworthy Anti-Virus program and do regular scans of your entire hard drive. 

Installers, Engineers and Technicians

Are you a spammer without even knowing it?