February 2, 2005
ZDnet is carrying an article about how the nice folks over at Spamhaus are warning of a potentially large increase in the amount of spam to come through in the next two months.
Apparently the spammers have made a zombie trojan that can figure out your ISP’s Email proxy information, and send spam through your PC as if you were actually sending it from your PC using your ISP’s Email service.
The potential is huge: major ISP’s won’t want to block every other major ISP, so the only solution will be content filtering, but that’ll likely only work if you’ve already been training your spam blocking software (like SpamAssassin) to what you think is spam or not over a period of months to be smart enough. Simply turning on this type of bayesian filtering right away may not help.
Thankfully, LunarPages includes SpamAssassin as a free service, and I’ve written up a tutorial in their forums for how to train SpamAssassin.