What better way to kick off this new blog than with news that a major-league spamming low-life has actually been arrested. This is the kind of news that just makes my day!

Robert Alan Soloway, 27, was arrested and is being charged with sending out billions of spam e-mail messages that cost businesses a huge amount of money.

On the surface, you may think spam is no big deal. It shows up in your e-mail inbox advertising online pharmacies, genital enhancement products or some other product that is mostly likely garbage and you simply delete it and move on with your life. If only it were that simple.

The billions of spam messages that are sent over the internet make up a very significant percentage of the net’s total traffic and the sheer volume of it slows the other traffic down.

Mr. Soloway is also being charged with distributing software that turns computers into “zombies” in order to increase his capacity to spew out spam e-mail. This is a very nasty thing to be doing to people.

A zombie is a computer that has been infected with a program that runs silently in the background and performs tasks that are dictated by whoever it was that engineered the infection.

Most often, these zombies are tasked with sending out massive quantities of spam e-mail messages, as the charges in Mr. Soloway’s case indicate. At the same time, these programs that control the armies of zombie computers is probably looking through all the e-mail addresses that are in the computer owner’s e-mail address book and sending those addresses back to whoever controls the zombies so the addresses can be added to the ever-growing list of e-mail addresses that will receive spam.

Yes, unless you are very confident about the security of your computer, it could indeed be a zombie and be doing things you are not aware of. There are a number of ways your computer could be infected with programs that are capable of turning it into a zombie.

Sometimes the zombie program can arrive as part of an e-mail message and invades your computer when you click to open an e-mail attachment. It can also happen if you visit a web site that is set up to exploit some known weakness in the security of your computer’s internet browser program.

Some of these zombie programs are nearly impossible to remove from your computer after they have invaded by using “root kit” techniques, but there’s plenty of time to talk about that at a later date.

Since I’ve managed to divert myself a bit from the original point of the story, I’ll attempt to get it back on track by reporting that Mr. Soloway may actually face some prison time, which would send a useful message to the other spammers out there.

Here’s hoping for a very harsh punishment for Robert Alan Soloway, the alleged “Spam King.” I think a few years in a state or federal prison might actually do him some good.

Welcome back!