The FTC intends to approach a total of 3.000 ISP all around the world and urge them to get involved into educating their customers about a thorny problem: spam zombies.

Spam zombies are computers that usually belong to innocent Internet users, but are used by spammers with the help of some trick technologies to send millions of unsolicited emails.

ISPs should block a common Internet port used to send email when possible, identify computers in their network that are sending atypical amounts of email and check if the computer is indeed a spammers' “victim”. On the other hand, they should inform their subscribers of how they can protect their computers from being hijacked by spammers, or how to clean them in case the hidden software has already been installed on their machines.

The FTC also advices ISPs to route consumers through their servers, but that may not be possible with technically proficient users that prefer to run their own e-mail servers.

Albania, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom are the 25 other countries that submitted to the law reinforcement in what spam zombies are concerned.

Currently, it is rather hard to estimate the amount of mass emails that are being sent through spam zombies. E-mail security vendor MX Logic estimates 44 percent, but Yahoo!News advances figures from 50 percent to 80 percent of total spam.

The FTC has created an Operation Spam Zombies web page to be consulted by anyone interested in this action.