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AOL Sues Five Spam Companies
sugapablo writes "AOL has filed lawsuits against five spamming companies, seeking damages in the millions for unwanted email. As the AP reports, AOL hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are though, filing the lawuits against some "John Does" and attempting to "subpoena service providers and others to try to track down the spammers"."
It wasn't locked down. It was running a stock NT4 (just like some of our customers). However there as a another box sitting between it and the wire that wasn't so eager to send packets off to port 25 on remote servers. The network looked like a connection with something funny going on. The result is that when the box came back on the net (it looks like a typical office machine behind a nated router), it would phone home and then a remote server would connect to the proxy that hte hackers insalled and try to send out messages. The 1st set of addresses go to a specifc set of addresses and then after a short time (if and only if the right address does get sent), then the box would get hit with hundreds of socket connections to its proxy. Once it did that it attempted to deliver a million or so messages in a very samll time. Once I had figured out their game, I could let their test messages through while blocking spam to most of the net. Most of the leaks involved @aol addresses because thats where the test accounts are. I faked accepance of about 5 million messages and flat out rejected millions more. I figure if this system had been up for more than about an hour (and truly open), it could have easly send a billion messages in a week.
In the local sage mailing list, someone mentioned that he hadn't gotten any spam that day. His email address was in the list list of stuff I rejected several times.
According to this article, he now runs a non-spam autoresponder service. But there are a good 150 hardcore spammers who took his place.