The biggest spammer on the Net? Comcast?

Comcast's high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail. Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. "We're the biggest spammer on the Internet," network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week. Lutner said Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company's official servers. Almost all of the remaining 700 million represent spam erupting from so-called zombie computers--a breathtaking figure that adds up to six or seven spam-o-grams for each American family every day.

Zombie computers arise when spammers seize on bugs in Microsoft Windows--or from naive users who click on attachments--to take over PCs and transform them into spambots. No hard numbers exist, but some estimates say that about one-third of spam comes from zombie computers with broadband connections. The owners of the zombie PCs typically don't even notice what's happening.

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