"No Way!" you say?

Well unless you've secured your computer against invasion by worms, viruses, spyware and trojans, it could stealthily be spewing forth spam every time you turn it on and connect to the Internet.

How is that possible?

"Unsecured computers can become compromised and hijacked when they are infected by worms, viruses, trojans, and spyware," explains Anne P. Mitchell, President and CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy (ISIPP). "Thousands of compromised PCs are churning out millions of pieces of spam - right now - while you are reading this. And their owners have no idea that it's happening," she adds.

And the results can be devastating. Anti-spam company Blue Security's Blue Frog service closed down yesterday (May 17, 2005) after a spammer known as "PharmaMaster" launched a viscious denial of service attack (DDOS) against the company, its customers, blog service and domain registrar.

DDOS attacks, for those unfamiliar with the term, happen when many different computers all bombard the same website or computer with data at the same time. The increased activity causes the computer or site to malfunction due or become unavailabe to the extreme volume hits.

"The question which we must ask ourselves is "How has one person been
able to cause so much destruction?" And the answer is "Because
millions of people allowed him to do so - by not securing their computers from hijackers",says Mitchell.

To help educate computer users about the need and ease of preventing of securing their computers, the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy (ISIPP) has just launched a "Take Back the Net" campaign. The campaign is designed to encourage computer owners to protect their computers and remind them how easy it is to do so.

The "Take Back the Net" campaign, and instructions for securing your
computer, can be found at http://www.SecureYourComputer.org/.