The year 2003 in review By Peter M. Abraham December 2003 While December was relatively quite, we had at least one customer receive an email blackmail threat stating that if our customer didn't pay off the blackmailer, the blackmailer would send 10,000,000 (yes, 10 million) SPAM messages fraudulently identifying our customer as being party to the sending. Our customer did report this to us as well as the FBI at http://www.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp. On November 17, 2003, we made the front page of the business section of our county newspaper, the Reading Eagle for our success in helping our customers have more time by reducing SPAM.  You can read the main article by going at Wyomissing firm filters Web for clients  (PDF File) or the preceding day's article at Say no to Sobig.F (PDF File). While it came late, the article on "Say no to Sobig.F" was based on our press released titled, "25,000 viruses stopped dead cold before reaching email readers" that we sent out near the end of August 2003. Our fight against viruses and SPAM mirrors the industry in so far as the fighting itself went; various news reports at news.yahoo.com, the Washington Post, and other news sources call 2003 the year of the viruses and SPAM. From communications with our colleagues and reading about our competitors, one of the several areas God blessed us is that while we were fighting just like the rest, we were actually winning more than we were losing. One thing to understand as you read more and more bout SPAM, anti-SPAM laws being put into effect, etc. is that those who are sending SPAM are very intelligent, human beings.  So while we struggle to keep systems up to date (and yes, those systems were created by human beings as well), it ends up being human being (the SPAM sender) against a system. While the systems are becoming more and more flexible as well as complex, to one degree or another they are static in between system updates.  So you will most likely continue to see a roller coaster ride of more SPAM, less SPAM, and so on throughout 2004. One of your new year resolutions, by the way, should be to secure new computers, and make sure your old ones are secure as well. I lost count of how many zombie computers I saw in 2003.  What's a zombie computer?  Well, for those science fiction horror movie fans, think of Return of the Living Dead or Army of Darkness. A zombie computer is one where a hacker has taken over the computer -- often without the knowledge or permission of the owner -- and is now in complete control of the computer. Zombie computers are being used to commit crime, send out SPAM, and create other forms of havoc over the Internet. While I would not call them Zombies, we helped around a dozen of our customers identify Trojan'd firewalls (yes, a firewall can get a virus / Trojan) and personal computers by virtue of the security methods we have put into place. Rather than drone on (my wife, Laura, regularly motions to me to "cut it short"), take a look at http://www.dynamicnet.net/news/articles/ to review the various news that occurred in 2003. In ending, Dynamic Net, Inc. been able to survive through all of the storms over the past eight years due to the following traits: We are blessed with a hard working, very loyal, set of employees who care about YOU as our customer. We are blessed with less than 1% per year turn over of our hosting clients. We are blessed that we have been able to scale over the years to meet almost every hosting requirement, simple to complex. We are blessed by not having any venture capital -- our focus is making our customers happy, not our investors. We thank God for our blessings, we thank our staff, and we thank our partners, providers, and vendors, and we thank you our customers. Thank you.