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Fortune 100 Companies' PCs Spewing Spam

by jordan | March 29, 2007 at 12:34 pm | 470 views | add comment

Frighteningly, machines maintained by big technocentric firms have been pwned (as it were): these machines are dancing to the spam tune under the very noses of some of tech's biggest sellers. Practically, it's worrisome because such machines would store far more contacts than the average home machine, thus spreading viruses like it was 28 Days Later. Also, on an other level, we tend to expect machines managed by those who sell us such machines to be better looked after.

When it comes to bot-infested PCs that spew spam, most of us assume the owners are newbie users too naive or careless to follow basic security measures. Think again. There's a good chance that the penis enlargement email that just landed in your inbox is from a network maintained by Oracle, Hewlett-Packard or some other Fortune 1000 company.

We've been poring over data collected by Support Intelligence, a firm that uses spam traps and other methods to trace the locations of infected computers. Over two weeks in mid-February, it assembled evidence that computers connected to the networks of at least 28 large organizations sent unsolicited email.

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These emails ran the spam gamut, from pump-and-dump scams to come-ons for Viagra. One appearing to come from Oracle tried to phish recipients' PayPal credentials. HP was also on the list. Best Buy, the giant electronics retailer, took the prize, having sent out more than 5,000 spams. To its credit, Best Buy acknowledged the spam problem after we brought it to the company's attention.

"We are repairing it as we speak, and we we're mortified," spokeswoman Paula Baldwin told us after IT administrators confirmed the Support-Intelligence findings. "We had no idea of the severity. We owe you our deepest gratitude."