The security software company seeks to replace Bruce Campbell as the top zombie hunter in the world.
A zombie computer takes instructions from a malicious remote user, and carries out those tasks unknown to the legitimate owner of the PC. It is estimated that thousands, maybe more, computers have been compromised by external parties, and then used for a variety of purposes.
The impact of thousands of zombied machines acting as a spam gateway has led to millions of messages plaguing email users worldwide. Though several nations have agreed to work together at squashing spam, all of those zombie computers must still be detected.
Very notably, a pair of Sober attacks in May led to millions of hateful nationalistic German messages being strewn across the Internet. Only after identifying the site where the zombie were getting instructions from was the crisis ended.
Sophos claims its ZombieAlert service will alert administrators when one of their machines sends a spam message to one of Sophos’ global spam traps. The service further helps admins avoid running afoul of the various DNS Blackhole Lists on the web by letting them know if an IP address they own appears on a list.
Internet Service Providers like AOL and others have shown up in various reports as having numerous zombie machines. Since the biggest networks have the most PCs on them, those networks suffer the greatest problems and the worst publicity from zombies.
Perhaps Sophos will focus its promotional efforts at those ISPs A concerted effort by providers in nations like China and the US in particular could make a profound dent in the spam garbage that shows up in everyone’s inboxes daily. And by banishing zombies, Mr. Campbell can focus on promoting his newest book.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
