Spam

The CIO minute in my inbox noted the following (below). Oops. I have a friend at work I play "hide the spam" with every few days. Not as dirty as it sounds unless we're playing with penile enhancement spam. Basically, the goal is to trick the other person into thinking they got an email they really want, as in, "Hey, remember we were talking about the best place to rent a dumpster? I found one super cheap." Then you add a few pertinent lines of text, and then dump in a piece of spam you found in your inbox. It's simultaneously annoying, disappointing, and funny. It's sort of the equivalent of the centerfold we stuck in the prop book in high school theater that stopped an actor cold during an actual performance. Anyway, I wonder if my company bot profile isn't just a record of my respamming fun.

Bots Found Inside Many Big Companies

"Support Intelligence, a network security company in San Francisco, is running "30 Days of Bots," a project that posts the names of big companies whose networks have been infected with spam-spewing bots.
Since March 28, the list identified more than a dozen corporations, including 3M, Aflac, AIG, Bank of America, Conseco and Thomson Financial.
Not all companies returned calls to Baseline, but the ones named above said they have found and stopped the spam. AIG, Aflac and Bank of America added that customer information wasn't compromised; Bank of America said financial information wasn't either.
Bots, short for robots, are PCs which have been infected with a piece of malware that forces them to take orders from a hacker. Baseline wrote about bots here."