spammer web scouring.
 

I was looking at my webstats earlier and I'm noticing a massive rise in people trying to hit things like /cgi-bin/formmail.pl and similar such items, I can only assume this is spammers searching for boxes that can explit as relays, I'm seeing literally hundreds of these, many with forged referrers to attempt to gain access. Still seeing hundreds of codered/nimda/rooted windows scans as well. Anyone else the same?

Yes, I'm also seeing a huge number of new attempts at just password guessing on ssh ports. But not on every box, just on one of them. Weird.

I'm still of the mind that a few bullets in the right places will curb the problem.

How much of the internet would we reclaim if half of the traffic caused by spammers and virus writers went away?

I have been noticeing LOTS of hits on my fire wall as well . A few years ago i installed zone alarm , MAN you should have seen the hits when i first installed it , then they all went away , just a few hits a month , then about a month ago i started noticeing a LOT of hits , medium to high priority , I have traced a few of them back and MOST of them are from russia and china . Guess they are just now getting net access over there .

Russia has been a hotbed of crackers for as long as the web has been around. There was a big comprimise of US.Gov systems a while back (99?) called operation moonlight maze that was traced back to a russian group.