The only way to slow the spread of zombies and other online threats is by going after them as resolutely and in as many ways as possible.
We have identified a number of entities in North America that we feel the evidence will show are liable and culpable for the spamming that occurred.
We hope this Halloween safety warning will capture the publics attention and ensure the lessons stick, so more people take advantage of the resources that are available to help protect them online.
We believe there are tens of millions of zombie computers out there.
We were startled. We did not expect the numbers to be that high and were surprised at the large volume of spam through just one zombie.
We are moving upstream and looking at the source of the spam problem, and it is obviously the zombies.
This was a pretty astonishing number for us. We knew that it would be a high volume, but this was an even greater volume of spam than we had anticipated passing through one computer.
The widespread use of zombie computers to commit crimes over the Internet presents a very real danger to law-abiding computer users.
The numbers were astonishing. Much higher than we expected.
This is compelling information that will hopefully get people's attention.
In those 20 days, this one computer received 5 million connection requests from spammers, and sent 18 million spam messages.
In the past two years we've seen what I would describe as an escalation in the use of zombies, ... and in just the past few months it's probably been more of a constant growth.