And on the topic of "zombies," apparently Pfizer's network has been hacked, and whoever did the hacking is controlling an indeterminate number of zombie machines to send out spam - including spam advertising for one of Pfizer's own products, Viagra.
[Rick] Wesson [CEO of Support Intelligence] says Pfizer computers have been spamming inboxes for the last six months and that he's kept 600 spam messages sent from company computers. He says 138 different Pfizer IP addresses have been blacklisted by various groups, but adds that he can't estimate the number of infected machines without more information or installing monitoring equipment on the edge of Pfizer's networks.
There's a lot of hand-wringing about Pfizer's inaction, but really, why is anyone surprised? Free advertising is free advertising.
