SpamHaus reports that a new piece of Malware, which takes over a computer and then uses it to send junk e-mail via the users own ISP provided mail server, has already begun a spike in SPAM circulation:

This means the spam appears to come from the ISP, making it very hard for an anti-spam blacklist to block it.

Previously, these zombie PCs have been used as mail servers to send spam emails directly to recipients.

"The Trojan is able to order proxies to send spam upstream to the ISP," said Steve Linford, director of SpamHaus. Linford believes that this Trojan was written by the same people who write spamming software.

It's feared that this could result in nearly all e-mail (95%) being SPAM by the end of 2005, thus signalling the collapse of the present system as we know it.

Such a vast quantity of junk e-mail would slow servers, causes crashes and increase the cost to consumers. MessageLabs have also confirmed the findings.

SpamHaus believes that the solution is to "throttle" the number of e-mails a broadband (they state “ADSL”) account can send and make sure that all ISP's filter viruses BEFORE they reach users. More @ ZDNet.