This week has been very busy on our network. With a staff of approximately 100, plus around 80 students, and about 100 other networked devices, our network is busy.

In fact, we’re exploring ways to increase bandwidth, which is amazing, because this current setup was supposed to be enough to handle the organization for another year.

Since I started, about 4 months ago, spam has not been much of a problem. But the past few weeks, we have been getting more and more.

As soon as we get some spam, we track down the IP and add it to our firewall. We do some research to see where it’s coming from.

Last week, most of our spam was from Russia. This week, we’ve been receiving spam from Mexico, Brazil and Japan.

Most are innocuous “male performance” enhancements, but we have had a handful of messages with Trojan Horse attachments.

They appear as a fake message from DHL. The subject line indicates a problem with delivery of a package. This is apparently the Bredolab virus.

This snippet comes from a Symantec security blog by Daren Lewis, “It comes from the Cutwail (aka. Pandex) botnet, which is one of the largest mass mailing botnets in existence, with over one million ‘zombie’ machines under its control.”

Spammers are scum.