Even when you’ve got the tools in place, it’s something you want to be vigilant about.

I think we’re finally going to see some activity from the ISPs to do something about this.

One of the things Sober does is it turns your computer into a spam zombie.

When you have an email server like Microsoft Exchange, which is the most common for small businesses, you end up buying more hardware than you need in order to process the spam you’ve let in.

The source of the vast majority of spam doesn’t come from legitimate business entities. They [the plans] don’t actually prevent spam, and they ask legitimate senders to pay for the sins of the real spammers.

Hackers have discovered IM; it’s the new playground for them.

There’s still plenty of unprotected home users, but this virus isn’t ground-breaking.

The increase in spam was due to an increase in tax preparation offers and other financial service offerings that are more prevalent as we approach April 15.

Unless you’re checking the log files on a mail server, you’re not going to be aware this is happening. What you might be aware of is slow performance on your mail server.

Until Thanksgiving, it was looking like a fairly ho-hum year in the area of e- mail viruses, and then the Sober variant broke out, and it set every record in the books for the sheer...

We have seen it start to ratchet up,

We thought we were going to have a boring year in viruses, and Sober really shook that up.

That’s an exceptional number for a virus in a 24-hour period. Things quieted down a little bit after a tremendous outbreak last week, but now this thing has gone back to pegging the needle.

It’s bad enough to get a virus like Sober that turns your PC into a zombie, but at least with that you can disinfect it.

I can only guess that this is one of those sort of anti-Microsoft sentiment things that’s going on here.

This is not a spam reduction measure. It is a way for a legitimate merchant to avoid getting a false/positive in an AOL spam filter.

We’re going to see some virus activity there that takes advantage of that. I think we’ll also start to see more companies recognizing that they need to put security solutions in place.

The issue of IM is that it’s being used on the public networks. IM is subject to all the same problems as e-mail. It’s extremely fast and efficient at propagating to a buddy list.

It’s still an amazing amount of garbage overall.

The issue with those systems is — and this is just starting to change — is that those are just LAN-based systems. Your employees can IM each other, but they don’t help you communicate with...

If you are in publishing, you get more spam sent to you than anybody else.

Support of the TLS protocol is built into all the modern mail servers. It simply needs to be turned on.

Not surprisingly, 85 per cent said spam and virus protection had been their number one concern in 2005.

What makes it a problem, regardless of why, is that smaller companies are the ones who have fewer defenses in place. There are no large dedicated IT staffs in place, or large budgets for technology,...