Battling the Zombie Web Site Armies
Peter Bennett first suspected his own Web site might have been turned into a spam-spewing zombie on Nov. 11, the night he discovered that a tiny program secretly uploaded to his site was forcing it to belch ads for rogue Internet pharmacies.
Bennett’s site had been silently “infected” via an unknown (at the time) vulnerability in a popular e-commerce software package. While most site owners probably would have just cleaned up the mess and moved on, Bennett — a longtime anti-spam vigilante — took the attack as a personal challenge.