the other day, a call came in from a lawyer’s office. their internet connection felt weak since a couple of hours. ‘it’s like walking in the mud and, the clerk told 'this never happened before. the result of an instantly performed speed test was gruesomely. it measured merely a one-tenth to the expected. a close look at the office’s router unveiled, that the last eighteen hours more than 3.2 gigabytes of data was squeezed through the wire, using almost all available bandwidth. but wherefrom and whither? after cutting off all local machines one by one, at last a machine was left over, running a mail-server among others. it was used all the time exclusively for internal purposes, with no incoming connection allowed. for laziness and asininity reasons, the former ‘administrator’ gave it neither a host- and domain name, nor any name at all. just ‘*’. the * is the so-called asterisk, which means ‘any’ in the computer's language. then yesterday, it came over the lawyers for no apparent reason, that it may be very formidable and unearthly cool to receive e-mail directly via smtp for bigheadedness. and so they briskly opened port 25 in the router's configuration w.t.t.m., because it was pictured in the manual, expert section. almost instantly, ‘any’ became it’s truly prominence and impact. the server now was an open mail relay and disseminated 14,628,571 spam-mails in 66,180 seconds according to the log files. the hole was detected and mended in less than 30 minutes. the accounting was de jure. and, of course, Thank Goodness It’s Friday. ... ««