U Get Junk?

It's an eternally irritating problem, the proliferation of junk e-mails forwarded to computer users world-wide, annoying the hell out of people through the useless and nastily time-consuming diligence required to identify and eliminate the nuisances. Let alone the problems of those creepy predator viruses and malware that some spamware includes, clogging up the arteries of our computers by using them as a medium to further proliferate these pestiferous messages.

A California company, an web-hosting service that claims it doesn't monitor how its customers use its services, has been shut down, having been accused of presenting as a opportunistic tool as a clearing house for a large portion of the world's junk e-mail. Now isn't that a huge relief? But of course, a temporary one, since the services that this company, McColo Corp., provided will be swiftly picked up by another unscrupulous company in the near future.

And the huge amount of these electronic missive-nuisances will resume, cluttering up in-boxes everywhere. These bulk advertisements or invitations to look into products of questionable value, along with phony money-making schemes are voluminously headache-inducing. Surprisingly, however, a study illustrated that while a mere one in every 12.5 million junk e-mails is responded to, spammers are still getting rich.

Hard to believe, but the figures tell us that more than 100 billion of these junk e-mails are sent out each and every day. Mostly representing the societally-averse vocation of fewer than 200 spammers. Spam senders used the auspices of this company's servers to forward commands to immense numbers of personal computers around the world that they had managed to hijack for their nefarious purposes.

Imagine, computer owners innocent of the fact that the slowdown in their computers' effectiveness isn't just busy Internet traffic, or to be attributed to an ageing computer, but because some clever spammer managed through writing intrusive software to compromise their computers. Effectively making robotic helpers out of them, harnessing collective power to enable them to send ever more messages into the ether.

Within two days of this company having been closed, the 153-billion e-mail messages normally sent through rogue servers had dropped significantly to 64-billion, according to an Internet security company, IronPort. Unfortunately, this won't make much of a difference to those huge numbers of malware-compromised computers, since once, unknown to them, their machine has been co-opted, it will continue to send out spam.

What a mess.