Zombie masters caught

I know, I sound so sci-fi. But there's nothing other-worldly about zombie masters, unfortunately. An awful lot of family PCs like yours and mine are "zombies" (computers that have been infected by Trojan software that gives control of them to the senders of the Trojan carrying worm or virus), unbeknownst to us! The "zombie masters" are the people who control whole networks (called "botnets") of these hijacked PCs to send spam (to make money) or launch denial-of-service attacks (against retail and other Web sites, sometimes for extortion money). Zombies in people's homes are by no means unusual. Microsoft, which has been working on this problem, believes "more than half of all spam is sent by zombies" and that there are tens of millions of zombies worldwide," CNET reports in an article about the company's progress in tracking zombie masters and shutting them down. Microsoft has identified 13 different spamming operations that use such zombies" so far, according to CNET. The US's Federal Trade Commission has been encouraging the Internet industry to take more action in this area. For example, it has asked Internet service providers (ISPs) to quarantine zombies and help us customers clean our infected PCs. For its ongoing investigation, "Microsoft intentionally created a zombie computer" - a PC not unlike one in anyone's household. "Over a three-week period, the PC was accessed 5 million times by its remote controllers and used to send out 18 million spam messages advertising more than 13,000 Web sites" (though Microsoft reportedly blocked the spam before it got sent). For more on this, see the latest from the Washington Post on local tech support and my "What if our computer's a zombie?!"