My clovegarden.com site has been inaccessable for well over 24 hours now - http, ftp and POP3. Tech support replied promptly to my inquiry yesterday saying their servers were under an intesive DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack which they were attempting to cope with. The guy said "synflood" but I don't know if he has all the details.

Between two of my aaxnet.com email boxes I now get about 200 "Delivery Failure" messages a day from zombie sent spam email with forged return addresses. I don't get any spam because I have an effective filter service, but the number of bounce messages is approaching the amount of spam I was getting before the service.

ISPs need to be required to monitor for this sort of activity and immediately cut off Internet access to zombies. Yes, this will prevent the owner from attempting to fix the problem - but given what I'm seeing the removal tools are inadquate and many downloaded by users are actually malware in disguise.

Yes, such a policy may shut off access for whole businesses and cause economic loss due to one infected machine. Tough. Maybe that'll improve their attitude toward internal controles.

Microsoft, of course, intends to profit from the weakness of its own products by selling "protection", and I think they should be hauled into court just like any other protection racket.

They've been too slow to get an effective product out anyway, Where I've seen their "spyware protection" stuff it's been totally helpless against what was infecting the machine.