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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.
Read the original version if you want
This Alan Ralsky?
8 25 6&tid=111
2 .h tm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/22/165
As described here, quite recently?
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_2002112
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?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This guy Ralsky sends a billion spams a day, which has got to be costing the unwilling recipients a huge amount of money in wasted resources and time, but the FBI is busy busting a few people who uncap their cable modems in Toledo Ohio.
C'mon, I know this guy deserves to be hung, drawn, and quartered, but let's not repeat the exact same link.
Oh well, time to go to work.
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.
The response rate is the key to the whole operation, said Ralsky. These days, it's about one-quarter of 1 percent.
"But you figure it out," said Ralsky. "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
Has he never figured out that if he spewed out less shit to people not wanting it, he would have to spend less dollars on hardware, bandwidth and personal security.
Also, it looks like he is trying to hide (stealth spam, etc.). Why does he do that as he is claiming that his business is legitimate. Why not admit that he is a shit-bag, sending loads of e-mails nobody wants, eating bandwidth from research and serious commercial sites.
Regardless of what Mr. Ralsky says, I don't feel that this new breed of Spam will ever come close to the problem e-mail Spam has. It seems to me that this type of spamming is just too easy to block. If this starts to become widespread, ISP's will likely ban any offending account. Any halfway secure corporate intranet should already prevent Windows messages to be passed in from the outside.
Ultimately, it's a lot harder to hide the identity of the sender here. There's no spoofed headers to fool people. Furthermore, most of the public doesn't _need_ Windows Messenging but they do need e-mail.
-- Brinko
So if Blocking Popup Ads is Theft, anyone wanna bet he has a good business model?
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
All the +5 funny responses about digging up +5 insightful and +5 informative responses that have already been posted on repeat stories!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Instead of firewalling the port, hack a small script that listens on the port and launches a "countermeasures" against the source IP adress.
Would some kind Windows hacker please program this?!
Yes I am aware that there may be legal implications, I'm just thinking about the tech here. That's why I'm saying countermeasures and not counterattacks, e.g. some kind of teergrube
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
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...
The USPS has not received tax money for operating expenses since 1982 (see here). Furthermore, people who send real-world junk-mail pay for the postage and the mailing. It's probably one of the bigger money makers for the USPS. If they didn't, it would have been stopped long ago.
E-mail spam is theft of service, pure and simple: the people sending the spam aren't paying the full cost.
I hate government intervention in the markets and involving the FBI should be an absolute nightmare to anyone with even a bit of libertarian in his heart.
So, libertarians now endorse theft because stopping it would restrict the liberty of the thief? I guess that sums up the internal contradictions of libertarianism as well as anything.
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
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
Yep, you got to love it. In America only two things are considered when in business. 1. Can it make money?....Duh. 2. Is it legal? The question never gets asked. Is it the right thing to do....? We have become a totally amoral society.
Wrong one. That's his former address, apparently - it currently belongs to someone else.
m 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
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/addressi
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.
Donate free food here
Nonsense. It is the FBI's job to arrest thieves when they fall under federal rather than the usual state jurisdiction. The only civil liberties issue is that the investigation and arrest must be made in a manner consistent with the rights of the accused (and anyone else who might be involved).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
That's handy. Not that I'd advocating it, of course, but wouldn't that be a ideal fake address to use if you had to use one registering for a pr0n site?
Just a thought...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I was living in an apartment complex while I was attending University, and I got on my neighbours last nerve a few times by playing music too loud in my apartment. A couple of times I got a visit from the local Police, kindly informing me that I was disturbing the peace. They had every right to get angry with me. I was disrupting their lives, in one way or another.
Sharing the Internet with SPAMMERS is a lot like living next door to an inconsiderate neighbour. Sure SPAM is "commercial", but just because something is commercial doesn't make it ok. Would it have been ok for me to blast commercial messages from my stereo into my neighbours apartments? I think not. And just because SPAM can be blocked if you don't want it doesn't make it ok either. My neighbours could have worn ear plugs to block out the sound, but they shouldn't have to.
I wonder how Alan Ralsky would feel if a few inconsiderate neighbours moved in next door to him.
that spam actually works... If scumbags like this can make millons it's because there are enough clueless users that actually buy the shit they advertise.
If hotmail, yahoo and the likes started using a more agressive filtering default policy (bayesian filters, and the like), and most mail clients had this kind of filters on, it's almost certain that the success rate of spam would go down.
As a side note... This guy being a known spammer, and spam being illegal in the states...Why the heck doesn't somebody put him away???
just my 2x10^(-2)$
Nice house. I'd like to throw him a housewarming party.
How warm?
Actually, there may be a bit of a tax in the sense that first-class subsidizes bulk rate. The USPS is only quasi-independent politically (they're not an agency, nor are they private) and has been much more solicitous of the bulk mailerts "needs" when price-hike time rolls around. Or such is my impression. I don't think bulk mail is a money-loser, but possibly not as profitable as it could be. USPS would certainly hate to lose bulk mail, and they promote the heck out of it if you look at their materials, the ones they don't put out at the local P.O.
But otherwise, carry on!
Very simple. One act is against federal law, the other act is not.
:-) your congress person. Call them. Do anything.
It's a Good Thing(tm) when the FBI/Police are allowed to only enforce laws that exist.
What we have to do is change the laws. Write (spam
During the recent campaign/election I had the opportunity to talk with a couple of candidates. I made sure that I understood their stance on my current pet peeves (H1B, DMCA, Copyrights), and voted accordingly. I also informed them as to *why* I was voting the way I was.
Might not do anything.
Might change the world...
www.christopherlewis.com
With all of the instant messaging tools available out there, is there any reason to run the messenger service to begin with?
This is why I really don't understand what the big deal is about the messenger spam. Just turn the damned thing off.
The same thing goes for spam from the 3rd world. I don't know anybody in China, Rangoon, Nigeria, so I see no reason to accept e-mail from these places. In fact, I would be willing to make the argument that the best way to prevent spam is to ONLY accept email from networks owned by companies that strictly forbid spam. If everyone were to do this, the market for spam hosted on legitimate servers would essentially dry up. That doesn't solve the problem of crackers breaking into systems and setting up spam-relays, but then that problem will only be solved by the owners of the boxes being competent and taking responsibility for securing and updating their systems. If people were keeping an eye on security holes and being vigilant about closing them off, most of the cracker activity online would cease to exist. Lets just see some "1337 d00d" try and break into a system that has been locked down properly and kept up-to-date.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.