Somewhere in some remote country, or right next door, a user opens an email attachment that unleashes a world of hurt onto his computer, or onto your network as their mail client spews out email to everyone in that person's contact list.

Spam is flooding our mailboxes. Even your administration accounts are buried in it, and you don't use them to surf the web or post to newsgroups.

Everyone's looking for who's responsible. That's easy, right? The virus-writers and spammers have to be stopped. Easier said than done. But let's face it, though you may not want to: any networking professional who has not taken the steps to properly lock down her setup is also partially responsible.

Am I blaming the victims? Only those who have set themselves up to be one. Viruses and spam have been around for years. We have the technology to deal with these issues before they even reach the user, most of the time. In fact, as network administrators, we have the ability to make sure at the very least that our systems aren't used to spread the problem.

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