"botnet herders can add it to its spam-spewing botnet" —Fahmida Y. Rashid in eWeek.com

This reporter spits out a string of alliterative language that labels the problem that SpamRankings.net helps diagnose.

Fahmida Y. Rashid wrote in eWeek.com 8 June 2011, UT Researchers Launch SpamRankings to Flag Hospitals Hijacked by Spammers:

"Poor security measures are generally responsible for employee workstations getting compromised, either by spam or malicious Web content. Once the machine is compromised, the botnet herders can add it to its spam-spewing botnet to send out malware to even more people. The original employee or the organization rarely has any idea the machine has been hijacked for this purpose."

That's a pretty good explanation for why outbound spam is a proxy for poor infosec.

-jsq