Spam King Lives Large off Others' E-Mail Troubles

An anonymous reader writes "Those who are fighting spam will tell you that one of the most notorious spammers out there is Alan Ralsky. Well, the Detroit Free Press has a very interesting article on him. This guy is about as unrepentant as they come, and he's saying he wants to branch out into delivering pop-up spam via the Windows Messanging service present on most Windows boxes. If you sysadmins out there have been wavering about whether to block spam-friendly networks, read this article, then go to The Spamhaus Project and SPEWS and start getting IP ranges to block." Update: 11/25 12:35 GMT by H : Yep, it's a dupe. Nope, I haven't had my coffee yet.

Comments

Dupe

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Read the original version if you want

Alan Ralsky?

[meringuoid]

This Alan Ralsky?

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/22/1658 25 6&tid=111

As described here, quite recently?

http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_20021122 .h tm

Furrfu... So, what's new? Now we know it's SMB popups for sure, then? What were those two Romanians doing telling him that would get through people's firewalls?

Re:Alan Ralsky?

[reaper20]

Pretty sure this is him.

What's that address again?

[imag0]

Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.

Hehe. Looks like someone is going to get some hatemail. Nice of Mike Wendland to slip that in there like that.

Slashdotting spamvertized sites may help...

[DocSnyder]

In Germany we have a BIG problem with porn dialer spam. Most of these spammers use accounts on the Canadian freeweb hoster "netmails.com", who refuses to kick spamvertized sites even on several spam incidents which have been spamvertizing the same accounts for weeks. We suspect "pink contracts" between the spammers and Netmails as well as between Netmails.com and its uplink AT&T Canada to keep these accounts and the spamhaus Netmails.com online.

Lots of the spam recipients are just fed up, and after each spam run thousands of annoyed people slashdot spamvertized accounts on Netmails.com until it blows the whistle. With the effect that "paying customers" look for a new hoster with better performance and will no longer supply Netmails.com with money. Hosting costs (traffic) on Netmails.com's side are growing, income is shrinking - so finally Netmails.com will have to change their spamfriendly business model or go down.

If spammers and spamfriendly hosters will make the experience of each spam wave resulting in an enormous amount of network traffic and server load, they will have to think twice whether their infrastructure withstands the next spam run...

Re:Q: Hidden Code in Spam?

[terrencefw]

Err, what exactly does this mean, can anyone tell me? I really, really doubt that opening a mail in, say, pine will send back any message without action on my part.

So, is this something which triggers MS Outlook? Or is this just some BS that spammer told the poor journalist?

It's just an image link in HTML formatted email to trigger an HTTP get request, eg: http://someserver/image.pl?spamee_id=HKJHS89872

James

Re:Could someone please confirm...

[BJH]

Wrong one. That's his former address, apparently - it currently belongs to someone else.

The one you're after is:
Buyer: ALAN M RALSKY
Buyer Mailing Address:
6747 MINNOW POND DR, WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 48322
Seller: BING CONSTRUCTION CO
Property Address: 6747 MINNOW POND DR, WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 48322
Sale Date: 8/28/2002
Recorded Date: 9/12/2002
Sale Price: $ 740,000 (Full Amount)

And a picture of the location is available at:

http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/addressim ag e.aspx?t=1&s=10&lon=-83.4306683068011&lat=42.53497 71549766&alon=-83.43067008&alat=42.53497312&w=1&re f=A%7c6747+Minnow+Pond+Dr%2c+West+Bloomfield%2c+MI +48322

Re:no sex?

[Halo1]

Not only that, it's simply not true. Look at this, more zoo and "incest porn" (whatever that is) from Ralsky than you can shake a stick at.