Perfectly timed for halloween comes a story of Microsoft hunting down spammers using a zombie.

Microsoft set-up a clean Windows PC and infected it with malicious code (I am guessing this part was particularly easy), in effect, turning it into a zombie. In just 20 days, the zombie PC received 5 million connection requests from spammers and sending 18 million spam messages. Now, if that isn’t scary, I don’t know what is.

They used the data they collected over those 20 days (including IP addresses of the computers making requests and of the websites being advertised in the spam) to identify 13 (spooky number) distinct spamming groups.

via TechWeb