Earlier this year I did a binge on machines in NZ that were infected by worms that spread via open shares. Since many of these are on dial up addresses it is impossible to tell if particular machines have been fixed [....]
A while back I used to test each IP which sent email to our email servers to see if it was an "open relay" (try and connect to email server and send test message and see if come back). It found A LOT of them (and auto blacklisted them) but it was too much of a nightmare due to the backlash from the people who didn't like me doing it. I guess me ":testing" was stealing thir bandwidth and they didn't like it. . Also a lot of the machines had uncomtactable "owners" or people who never replied (or even spoke english). The Hit Ratio of getting them fixed was very low. Thanks Craig