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On The Trail Of Super-Zonda
Dynamoo writes "BBC Radio 4 has been on the trail of the notorious Super-Zonda spammers and crackers, according to this article. Super-Zonda's trick is to find insecure hosts and pressgang them into webservers for mail order brides, viagra and other spam favorites. In this case a server is traced back to a hacked machine at a major international airline.
The BBC investigate some of the people allegedly behind the spam in an investigation starting on the Spamhaus houseboat in London and ending in the Netherlands via Moscow. The BBC point the finger at Martijn Bevelander of MegaProvider as being not the innocent party he seems. The BBC provide some evidence to back this up, and are not known for rash accusations."
Finally, investigative reporting that is actually helpful and interesting. Go the Beeb : )
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
But it is a crime that is very difficult to police, and a crime that is growing daily, as spammers find ever more inventive ways of staying ahead.
Well, now Microsoft is on the case. So they'd just better watch out.
The coolest voice ever.
Wasn't that one of the characters in the original Street-Fighter 2 arcade?
Ñ'
How about people just stop buying the junk the spammers are selling? I guarantee you it will all disappear overnight if everyone does. Thats the beauty of the free market- its only around if it remains desirable.
They probably didn't really think it was that diffrent from finding insecure relays or proxies. Honestly, a lot of what Spammers do could be considered hacking (port scanning for open relays/proxies, a lot of which may be already infected with viruses or hax0red).
I hope they give 'em the chair!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A special investigation by the BBC has revealed that British Airways was used without its knowledge to host a website advertising Russian mail order brides.
As if the BBC would ever admit its nation's premier airline was desperate for some hot Siberian lovin'.
The coolest voice ever.
Damn, here I was hoping there would be a chance of prosicuting in a country that still has the death penalty. Preferably something slow.
--I don't want the world, I just want your half.
Somebody should tell the Israelis. They think the BBC is biased, and their reporting is akin to nazi propaganda.
kill.
KILL!!
KIILLLL!!!!
Rid the world of the filthy disgusting spammonger! Use his vile machines to broadcast a message to the world that spam shall not go unpunished! The land shall be purified!*
*This rant curtesy of having just watched Boondock Saints and Dune.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I've heard enough! weez gonna have ourselves a good ol fashion hangin'
this is not a sig
Many have tried but its proven very difficult to get really up close to the viagra spammers.
Look idiot. How easy to you think it is to convince everyone to stop paying for stuff they get in spam. It's not even possible to get everyone to stop murdering people and molesting children. (I'm not saying that buying something from a spam is as bad as that, of course)
.001% in order to make money.
But seriously, these spammers only need to get
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I thought the mail order bride email were jokes, not SPAM.
...."
<russian accent>
"Hello, My name is Tania and I have executed 18 years of age. I love
</russian accent>
I assume that's air freight.
This is computer cracking/fraud at its seedy worst.
Are these the jokers responsible for the Pornographic spam and Mail-order brides dreck that fills up my inbox? And they are using hacked commercial webservers as relay points for this cruft?
Anyone who assists these guys is guilty of multiple computer crimes, at least as an accessory if nothing else (unless they are in a country that HAS no such laws, or doesn't honor extradition requests from foreign nations). Nobody can claim this is innocent "hacking" for education, curiousity, or "helping out" the victim by showing them what holes they have... this is outright exploitation of someone else's property, equipment, bandwidth, etc for your own financial gain, via spam, no less.
This is fraud, any way you slice it... somebody needs to go to jail.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I did not give you permission to use my picture.
I hate the web.
Probably only about .001% of recipients will actually buy the product, but spammers keep on, because as small of a percentage as that is, its still a profit from whats essentially free mass advertising.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Spam is another form of Speech. Yes, it is grossly abused and outright annoying, but it is still protected here in the U.S. (except for pending anti-spam legislation).
But the actions of the spammers (Super-Zonda in this case) are reprehensible. They are clearly breaking the law in hacking into people's computers in the manner that they are, and they should be punished appropriately for that.
Here is one aspect of the DMCA that is very important to retain even if the rest is done away with. If you have a system with some sort of "protection" and someone deliberately circumvents that protection to use your system for illegal activities, that someone should be punished for not just the illegal activities but also for the circumvention of the protections you set up. While I don't advocate the creation of laws for it's own sake (like many gun laws), I think that having a law in place that punishes criminals not just for the crime itself but also for the method of the crime is important in cases like this.
I have been pwned because my
People that run open SMTP relays are part of the problem. Just as pawn shops that accept goods of dubious origin serve as fences and bear some responsibility for the problem of burglary, so do administrators that run open SMTP relays, either maliciously or out of stupidity, bear some responsibility for the spam problem.
I'd like to see owners of open SMTP relays be liable.
I know it may not be accurate in this particular case, but would overhauling SMTP help reduce spam and other UCE? STMP was built for a more, erm, polite era and seems like its failing in this day and age with regards to spam.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Paypal donations to hi-tech hit squads, a la Tom Clancy and his Mr. Clark, to track down and eliminate, with EXTREME prejudice, any and all spammers, anywhere in the world. I'd give them $5/month, easy. Hell, film it and broadcast it like COPS. It's not like the embedded media have any real use for those handy portable vidcams they were sporting recently. Now _THAT'S_ a pay per view!
These guys don't care about laws, and any and all fines they MAY receive are just a cost of doing business and a lesson learned on how NOT to do it next time. Mind you, I think they'd start caring if they starting being hurt and/or killed.
And I'm only half kidding...
Anyone wishing to apply for such a squad, please email to...
$0.02 (CDN)
It's worth listening to the more entertaining audio report, rather than just reading the (slightly drier) text.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
They pursue this line of business because it's profitable. If we can't reduce the profit potential we need a large deterrent. Executing spammers would make a great deterrent. How come abortion foes can assemble these kind of mercenary nuts but we as geeks don't have this persuasive power? We need to proselytize the right people for this job. Only then can we free ourselves of such menaces as spammers, SCO, and other parasites. Let's raise a call to arms.
If reporters can find these spammers who break the law why can't law enforcement do the same?
Who owns your data?
The trick they use, as I understand it, is to rig their DNS servers to respond differently based on the IP address querying the spammed domains. The DNS responds with the address of an open HTTP proxy normally, and when the open HTTP proxy does the lookup, it gets a different address - the spammer's webserver. That webserver then only responds to those open proxies. The moral of the story is to be more careful when you put any proxy on the internet.
Beer wants to be free
Used server 'tarpits' but with a difference...
if every mail server was configured to (a) recognise spam as it arrived and then (b) reply to that spam automatically (with forged headers, subject etc etc) then spamming would suddenly have a cost for the spammers.
They would have to either manually work through every reply or just give up.
No spammer would last more than 1 or two attempts before giving it up as a bad job.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but from where I type, until mail transfer methods are reformed to challenge senders (something along the lines of whitelists) and only send message headers before such challenges are passed/accepted, this BS will continue. E-mail will continue to suck Olympic cock until then.
And spam accounting for half of all messages? I don't know what to say first. "Only half?!" Or more on my point, "Half. How much more incentive do we need to reform e-mail?"
They're all dying.
And we'll finally find a good use for the (offline version) Slashdot effect.
Anyone familiar with system security would be aware that it is not easy for a hacker to make his/her steps untraceable. It might cost the governments a little money to track them and take necessary actions to prevent these people in staying profitable in their activities, but that might just be the only way to stop them.
If these spammers are outside of the free world they still have to ship the product to the idiot who buys it from them!
Beat the hell outa the spammers.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Perhaps it might do some good to publish some viagra vendors' home addresses?
I'll bet that the more legit a spammers' customer is, they better they are as a spammer's customer.
But the more legit they are, the more vulnerable they are to such tactics.
If a spammer's customer is trying to generate "click-through", then their worst nightmare might just be having to actually deal with live people - and angry ones at that.
Sure, these people can be hard to track down, but we may be just the bunch to do it.
Their coverage of Tony Blair and the war in Iraq is nothing short of New York Timesish.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
When applied to crises, legislation rarely affects changes as intended. Please, people, do not let the politicians get into this. Do not give them another issue to gain face time, tack non-germane amendments to another bill, and complicate a problem with a simpler technical solution. Please, those of you with bigger programming wits than I, develop an alternative to SMTP.
- The BBC provide some evidence to back this up, and are not known for rash accusations
Unless you're an oil-rich Arab nation...Why does the mailorder bride site look like an exact ripoff of hotornot? damn, they are lazy enough to just copy a website but not to skip over hosting it on a hijacked server....
Made me laugh!
-kgj
Wait, so this has nothing to do with the Pagani Zonda S?
/. never has anything for the car nerds...
Damnit,
I spent 6 months living and working in Siberia, and I can tell you that the Siberian lovin' is damn hot :-)
The natives were VERY friendly.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Be the parties who go to jail. I mean hard jail time for any person who causes this sort of nonsense to happen.
I want them in jail with a specific exclusion from any form of communication other than snail mail.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Being in neither the UK or the US, what does that mean?
I know the NYT is considered small l liberal...
Yay me!
Why do commercial spammers spam? Well, for the ones who try it more than once, it's because somebody pays them to do it. Who pays them to spam you? The suckers who buy from them pay them to do it. Without that money the spammers would have little reason to spam.
So what you need to do is punish the spammer's customers, find them, out them and make them afraid.
The way to do this is simple. Just send out some really attractive spams. Offer legit products at irresistable prices. Have legit sites to back up that the offer is real and not too good to be true. Anybody who responds, however, is an evil spam funder, and they will give you all their ID information, which you can use to punish them for funding spammers!
That will stop 'em.
(For the satire impaired, that's what this is.)
It is a fairly trivial matter for most regular /. readers to back trace a spam mail to the source server. In nearly all cases the server is an open relay or has been owned - either way the plug should be pulled.
I would like to see a semi-automated tools to assist in this. It would allow people to respond to the majority of spam they receive with little effort.
The tools would require a minimum of:
* Extract IP from header.
* Reverse DNS lookup of host computer (to get domain).
* Extract primary contact from DNS registration or email the postmaster advising them of situation.
* And finally a temporary blacklist site could be an option as well (We don't want to permanently blacklist British Airways do we?).
Does anyone else have any thoughts on desirable functionality or incorrect assumptions I have made?
Q.
Insert Signature Here
That wouldn't really solve the problem, unless the replacement was effectively to not have worldwide email. It really comes down to a problem of authenticating the source of the mail, and even then you need some way to know if that source is acceptable. Both of those are really tough problems when applied to a worldwide scale.
Think about secure TLS/SSL websites. The authenticity check is dependent upon the trustworthyness of the root CAs. The respectable CAs must do a lot of manual checking of the registrant's identity before signing a certificate. And that costs a lot of time and money and infrastructure. And even then the certificate-based system we have for webpages is not all that great, it's still relatively easy to hijack websites or even run it yourself (who besides me actually bothers to look at the certificate details when they go to a secure site, or even removes some of the root CAs from their browser's builtin list?).
Now, there certainly should be a way to get the domain name registration information as verifyable as certificate registrations; because the whois databases right now are laughably corrupt, not even the most fundamental checks are performed to insure that the data is correct. But even then, that doesn't stop spam, although it may help you track them down better.
And asuming you have perfect authentication, knowing the source is authentic still doesn't determine whether you consider the source to be a spammer or not. A certificate only proves identity, it doesn't say anything about the type of content being sent. You certainly wouldn't be able to know the millions of different potential email sources, nor keep up with the minute-to-minute changes. And if you're a business you can't use a known sender whitelist; or you may never get job resumes, sales inquires, and so forth. So someone would have to build a list of all "good" non-spammer certificates.
But then you're back to the same situation we have now. You'd just be using certificates or something like that instead of IP addresses as the "identity" you'd be matching against some database, like the many blackhole lists. And given how easy it is to hijack insecure computers, there would certainly be holes around that type of system too.
Now true, the insecurity of vanilla SMTP is an issue for confidentiality purposes, but you can't really blame spam on that. And if you use the already standardized SMTP extensions, such as STARTLS or S/MIME, then SMTP can be pretty secure. Spam is a social problem, not a technology problem.
I found some mortgage information at the interesting rate of 250% monthly so I could afford for a MBA in an unknown university and begin to work to settle mydebts and get a new credit card to buy some viagra and increase my satisfaction during my dates with single russian girls.
... I don't need that!
Oh wait
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I wonder how many of these spammers are using open relays.
Whenever I read of proposed spam legislation and law enforcement attempts, I can't help but think that this somehow encourages companies and individuals to not take the neccessary care in configuring thier hosts, suscribing to blackhole lists, or running proper filters on thier hosts/servers.
When I see the disparity between email providers in the amount of spam I recieve, I realise that the admins are at least partially to blame. (My mail account at mail.com recieves approximately 7 to 12 spam emails a day, while my account at gmx has recieved only about 5 during the past year.)
Are there still any reliable blackhole lists?
Can/should email providers filter outgoing mail to regulate thier customers?
Can administrators control the spam problem?
I really don't like the idea of leaving this up to legislation, as it's likely that the DMA can buy themselves a few loopholes.
Read, L
"A special investigation by the BBC has revealed that British Airways was used without its knowledge to host a website advertising Russian mail order brides."
Anyone besides me imagine the "Marry Her" button linking to BA's Moscow flight schedule?
Nah. Never mind.
These spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged thier penises, taken viagra, and are looking for a new relationship. Now that would be poetic justice.
Second, it appears that Super-Zonda just recently moved the actual host (well, it too was a proxy) to CyberAngels (they had been on servepath.com for a long time, then ev1 [I think it was] for a weekend, then
The spammer uses network scanning tools to find an open web proxy. A system where, with the proxy located at {PROXY_IP} as its IP address,
telnet {PROXY_IP} 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nytimes.com
gets the front page of the NY Times.
He then does the following.
He uses something like the following:
telnet {PROXY_IP} 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: [a_hostname_of_his_own]
and looks at his nameserver's records to see whence came a request to resolve his hostname. Now he knows the location of the nameserver/resolver used by the open proxy. He does this a few times (the proxy may use several nameservers - just as in configuring your windows system for the 'net, you enter two nameservers in the settings). He also checks at his web server to see whence comes the connection (the proxy may or may not make its outgoing connections using the same IP address).
Now he sets his nameserver to do the following:
1: It responds to requests to resolve his spam site which come from the nameserver(s) used by the proxy with the correct IP address (of his spam site).
2: It responds to ANYONE else with the IP address of the open web proxy.
He then sets up his web server itself to drop all packets to port 80 (maybe to all other ports as well) EXCEPT packets to his port 80 *which come from the abused proxy*.
The result? Everyone resolves his spamvertized host to the abused, hacked, illegally accessed web proxy and sends HTTP packets thither. That server/proxy attempts to get and serve up the pages by getting the IP address from its resolver which then gets the IP address of the hacker/spammer's actual site and accesses it and gets the page to return to the victim. Even if one happens to guess at the location of the actual spammer's machine, one cannot verify it since it appears dead to anyone except the proxy.
The trick to locating him is to find out what resolver the proxy is using and have your resolver, nslookup or dig in Linux, say, do a lookup, but not via your ISP's nameserver - instead use the proxy's nameserver/resolver. Then you find whence the proxy got what it served up.
[By the way, this is a pro-spam operation and the spammer's site may host some clients' stuff and in some cases, at least, it actually proxies the pages from another site.]
It is not a matter of the spammer "hacking" anything. It is simply his hijacking web servers which serve as proxies but which allow anyone to use them as proxies.
Why "super-zonda"? The names he used for his nameservers were ns1.super-zonda.com, etc. For other spamertized domains he registered different names for the nameservers, but they were located at the same IP addresses/locations.
One of the web servers/open proxies he hijacked was a British Airways travel shop server. He also hijacked a mideast bank web server. A K12 server in Colorado, I think it was. Several in Korea. He would spam for many clients at once, hijacking several web servers (one for every one or two of the hostnames).
The article on the BBC says:
"When Paul and Matt looked up which computer the website was using to host its service, the IP address belonged to British Airways."
Wrong. That was what it appeared to be. The pages were not there.
That site was proxying them.
I'm serious.
a 2k /fraud.html
Today, I was working on a problem with our spamassassin server running out of memory, and saw something scary in the log file - email from <one of our biggest customers> to <executive who reports directly to the CEO>, subject "Legal action started", marked as spam.
Very bad to get false positives like this!
However, on tracking it down, it was....
You guessed it....
An ad for an herbal product to "Enlarge your P3n1s!!"
Can we start hunting them down and shooting them yet? Please, pretty please?
http://scs.northwestern.edu/nuilr/peer-net/medi
I'm sorry that the BBC being a truly independent news organisation ruins your enjoyment of the suffering of the Iraqi people.
Perhaps you prefer getting all your news from "patriotic" broadcasters, like FOX News, who won't bring you anything that doesn't paint the US/UK/other invasion in anything apart from a positive light. Good for you - if you want your news censored by a broadcaster who's more interested in keeping you watching at any cost that it is in the truth then that's your perogative. But some of us prefer getting the raw facts and making our minds up for ourselves.
Yes, the BBC's coverage of the war hasn't been a flag-waving exercise. But why should it be? Because you say so? Because a government official says so? Sometimes the truth isn't as pretty as we would like but that doesn't make that truth any less valid or worthy of our attention.
Perhaps you like watching the news brought to you by people who would probably have their war coverage sponsored by a handgun manufacturer if they thought that they could get away with it. But I and many others don't.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
A spammer is NOT someone who is making an offer - that's the spammer's CUSTOMER ("client" would be a less confusing term).....and us marks are the spammer's client's intended customers.
We need to find out who these clients are and give THEM the Ralsky treatment or worse.
I believe something like Hashcash is the solution, but it must be widely deployed to be effective.
C'mon... $10,000 would hardly pay 1/10th the salary of a professional assassin (trust me, they ARE in it for the money :) Hell, it wouldn't even be enough to purchase his rifle and ammunition. A real budget would go something like this:
:)
:)
Crack team of 5 special ops commandos, specially trained in computer and technical ops as well as the usual firearms and special weapons skills: $500,000/yr
Kalashnikov assault rifles, RPG launchers, Semtex/C4 explosives, various other tools of the trade: $500,000/yr
Worldwide deployment capability (courtesy of the Pentagon's new hypersonic bomber): $100,000/operation
Technological tools and equipment for tracking spammers' proxies, pinpointing their original IP addresses, and geolocating to their current coordinates: Free (donated by Slashdotters the world over)
The look on M. Bevelander's face as he gets what's coming to him: Priceless
(Please note: The foregoing is merely a humorous exercise and not intended to imply any actual intent to enter into a conspiracy to murder a foreign national. Just in case any folks at the Bureau are reading this
Surely you can find a use for the lovely credit card information they used to purchase these irresistable products from you.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Although, the only reason you got those messages were because you instructed your computer at home to FETCH them from a server somewhere. Nobody forced those messages into your home.
I say this, though.. there is a national do not call list. in the US.. why not a do-not-spam list?
The death of any child is tragic no matter what the circumstances -- Be it gas, bullet, or suicide bomber.
However, Saddam was attempting genocide, using gas to indiscriminately kill thousands. This is the most fucked up way to put down an uprising that I can think of. This is also a regime that used a plastic-chipping machine for executions.
Israel is attempting to put down radical Palestinian group leaders to avoid suicide bombings against their civilians. They do so in a very aggressive manner, quite often killing civilians in the process. The target of this aggression is the militants. More often than not however, innocent civilians are killed. (Let there be no doubt, I think that Israel's policies are wrong, and only worsen their situation)
Intent is everything. Both are fucked up, but I consider Saddam's regeme to be orders of magnitude more fucked up than Israel or Palestine.
Any attempt to equate the two just boggles my comprehension. The Israelis have done stupid and horrible things in the past and present, but genocide is not one of them.
If Israel wanted to, they could flatten both the West Bank and Gazza easily, as Israel supposedly has chemical and nuclear weapons. But they haven't. Nor will they.
I shouldn't have to remind you that the death of an Israeli child via suicide bomber is no more morbid, tragic, or sickening than any other murdered child.
I think they also got dropped from another provider as well. There was some speculation that they were using a hijacked IP block.
There's betting on NANAE about where he pops up next.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
See Jim Bell's Assassination Politics. Beware, the government does not have a sense of humor. Jim Bell is currently in federal prison, serving a 10 year sentence for "stalking" an IRS agent. For details, see here.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
http://belps.freewebsites.com/
Sadly this guy didn't eliminate them with all the prejudice I would like; but still, I get a warm fuzzy feeling every time I see this site.
My other OS is the MCP!
Faulty, flawed, absurd?
In my case, I read the stinkin' message off disk in pine that sendmail graciously placed on the platter while I was busy doing other things. It came into the "house" via the network connection that does in fact go over a wire that comes through a wall.
In the case of other people in the same household, they do do a FETCH from different rooms, but all contained within the same building.
So, are we talking about vampires that have to be invited in or are we talking about spam.
Spam is an unwanted, egregious denial of service attack. For end users it might be a few messages to a hundred. For many people responsible for actual infrastructure it is a DoS attack, nothing more. No better or worse than a worm or syn flood or any other attempt to make some remote system unusable.
Spam legislation will work no better than fax and cell phone protection laws. Get plenty of spam on those as well, and although there are laws "protecting" consumers, they've gotten just as bad using many of the same techniques.
Sadly, outing these people doesn't seem to do much more than that. Spamhaus is an excellent example. There are many people listed on spamhaus by name, and many have addresses associated with them. One live in the same town I live in. The local rag has done several articles on him and he has been vilified on slashdot. Aside from other criminal activities that may sideline him, and unless he's part of the MS suit, spam isn't going to put him away.
Since late last year and early this year, I've captured 59K of spam messages for analysis and possible prosecution/recompense for wasted time. Those 59K of spam doesn't count those blocked by spamassassin and a local implementation of blocking by IP we use here. In the last few weeks I've blocked close to 10K of messages.
Spammers are criminals, plain and simple, in my book.
First of all, you'd need to keep records of all email receipts for two days, and then records of where it came from, according to which physical connection the email came through.
Then, if someone gets spam, they send it to their ISP within the same day. The ISP first compares the headers with the actual receipt on the email (that is, where our own computers say it came from is actually where it came from). If forged, the computer does two things: (1) send an email to the forging computer's ADMIN (2) chalk up a tally for "forged header".
If not forged, it (1) sends a report to the spam sourcing computer "this is a spam", and lets the spam-source computer deal with it similarly (2) chalks up a tally for "spam".
Then, when prioritizing emails, the computer handles it according to probability for trustworthiness: the most trustworthy computers get their email handled first; the least trustworthy computers have to wait. The ISP admin sets the numbers according to what he wants. Some ISPs will allow spam through, but slowly. Other ISPs will kill everything. My guess is that most ISPs will say "kill 99.44% for forgeries; allow server speed (1 - fractionspam)^4 for spam."
If there is a major spam server, within a day its spam going to start getting heavily rejected. That is, its emails will simply go unserviced. Then its up the server admin to straighten things out.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
They're so much worse than the elections held in all the Arab countries...
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/critiqu
To quote:
CNN admits that knowledge of murder, torture, and planned assassinations were suppressed in order to maintain CNN's Baghdad bureau.
Also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion /11JORD.html
Or is that "justified"?
Because Sharon's giving the Arabs a chance for peace now - and if they don't take it this time the Isreali people will eventually say enough is enough.
Look at what the US did after 9/11 - if you stood in the way of that you got steamrollered. Do the math for the percentage of population getting killed by terrorism in Isreal and compare that to 9/11.
The Isreali's are going to go off eventually - and when they do the radical Islamicists will be gone...
I'm really sick of hearing how the way to take the money out of spam is to charge for e-mail.
Instead of attacking the supply side, attack the demand side. Forget the fact that most of these spammers are outside the US. The fact is, most spam *advertisers* are in the US.
If the law allowed companies/people to be sued for using a service that has been convicted of using illegal means to send spam (invalid return address, hijacked systems, forged headers, etc), it would take about one or two high publicity lawsuits against a couple of spam buyers (lower mortgage rates! viagra! enlargement!) to curb the problem.
This legislation to kill spam by going after the senders will work for all of about a day, until all the buyers start buying service from someone offshore.
This would be self-regulating, market driven phenomenon if played out properly. Legitimate mailing companies could advertise their "legitimacy" and real companies could use those services for real, honest-to-goodness marketing. If someone used a shady mailing company, then they expose themselves to damages.
Whatever. Spam will not significantly decrease until the companies that contract out the services of these mailers have the screws put to 'em.
Re: your sig (donate IQ points)
... well, explosions.
I just hacked the system. Click on this link to get ten free IQ points!
You will see that you have successfully donated -10 IQ points, which now means that you can solve math problems you could not solve before.
Please do not take more than your share, though. Dave Berry of the Miami Herald is already reporting that some people down there have suffered from
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
In some not too recent discussion here on /. somebody posted a link to how a guy got pissed off and cracked a spammer's computer, collecting all sorts of data (including not-so-good nude pictures) and writing a highly amusing report on it. Does anyone know that link?
"The BBC ... are not known for rash accusations"
;-)
I'm not sure Alastair Campbell would agree...
IT's no big surprise, this Bevelander was a well known young internet interpreneur, who became famous in the Netherlands because he represented the internet boom. But he didn't do anything special, and he is the kind of guy who would do anything for money.
Whilst I would usually chuckle with mirth at such a witty posting, I just clicked the bastard link sitting in my office and just had to explain "what was that" to the guy next to me.
Both some Palestian militants and some parts of the Israeli army have commited atrocities (and continue to do so). Whilst I would condem the actions of both sides, the Israeli army as a representative of a democratic government has a duty to abide by international law. If you watched the BBC documentary on Israel's arms program you'd be left in little doubt of it's existence and even if you choose to take another view, there are a number of interesting facts that came to light.
as we know him in holland
Years ago now, Martijn Bevelander gained a very bad reputation for mass registration of thousands of company names and tens of thousands of ordinary Dutch words under the .nl domain, at one point over 1 million domain names in all, offering these at inflated prices, and trying to force many Internet disabled companies to use his hosting services as well as their "own" domain name. It's been very quiet around him lately, so I guess it was about time (international) journalists took a good look at his behaviour again. Calling him a spammer is a bit too much IMO, but him providing services to Internet abusers such as spammers is not news (to the Dutch).
I'm a network engineer for a medium-sized ISP in The Netherlands. Martijn Bevelander has been operating in de dutch ISP world for years now. Previously most people saw him as a huge clown; his daddy (some chief somewhere) seems to always fund his playing in the internetworld while he manages to get all his companies to go broke.
His staff continues to show their good knowledge on the Internet: see this mail where one of his noc monkeys notifies the operators on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange of a new announcement from Bevelander Internet Services: 192.168.0.0/16. Perhaps this was just a sneak preview into the future?
The dutch media have reported on several occasions on him: check this link from Webwereld.
Insiders still laugh on his ignorance regarding security. He used to have his printers wide open connected to the internet, resulting people to send complete black pages to it. Another great story is how he continued to buy new 3com switches after he failed to change the administrators access to them and someone from the outside shutdown't his uplink port. Yeah Martijn, they were all broken.
So far he was just a joke. The troubles started when his company Bevelander Internet Services got broke and he quickly setup a new company called Megaprovider. After most of the customers were transferred, he sold the empty remains to Concepts ICT. Appearantly Megaprovider is not doing to good as well, seeing his Cyberangels adventure.
One of his well-known associates, Joshua Dodds, is known as a true DDoS-kiddo, DoS'ing everyting and everyone who says a bad thing about him on IRCnet. I guess they will never learn...
Pascalstraat 17
2014KZ Haarlem
Tel.023-5101094
Fax.023-5441982
It is probably an office address, but I'd guess he spends time there as well. International callers should not forget to add the country code for the Netherlands, which is 31.
Martijn Bevelander is a highly controversial figure: he dropped out of school, then started an internet company (at a very young age) during the boom, got into legal trouble with lots of people, and finally went broke. Some people think he is the second coming of Bill Gates (quite a few people think of Bill as a role model...). Others think he is a lier and a thief. He appears to have made a business out of hijacking domain names, but foolishly forgot to register his own name.
There is a very critical article in Dutch here (search for "martijn"). Another list of critical articles, again in Dutch, is here. There is a picture here, although (according to the first link) the equipment in the background is not actually his.
All in all, although he himself thinks he is a genius, in reality he is nothing more than a parasite.
I cannot, of course, condone any course of violence against his person. However, if (for example) the United States were to think of him as an international crack dealer and demand his extradition, I wouldn't shed any tears for this fellow countryman...
The channels aimed at British audiences (ie. for those who pay the licence fee) do not carry adverts. These are BBC1, 2, 3, 4, Children's BBC, CBebbies (for toddlers), News 24 and BBC Parliament. Same goes for audio services Radio 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, Asian Network, BBC Cymru (Welsh language), BBC Local Radio etc. These are almost entirely funded by the licence fee.
In the case of advert-free satellite signals these are quite literally "aimed"; the BBC broadcast advert-free from a satellite with tight coverage of the UK mainland with only very minimal bleed into the rest of Europe.
The channels aimed at international audiences (ie. for those who do not pay the licence fee) are funded by a mixture of foriegn office taxpayer's money, adverts and in some cases subscriptions. These include BBC World, BBC Prime and BBC America and are handled by a slightly seperate commerical company called BBC Worldwide and are broadcast on a number of satellites with coverage for most countries.
The international audio stations such as BBC World Service and BBC English By Radio are funded solely by the foreign office (similar to the funding for the Voice of America).
British viewers can also see BBC programming on non-BBC channels with advertising such as S4C (Welsh language), UK Gold (comedy & soap repeats) and UK History (documentary repeats). Some of these channels are entirely funded by advertising, some also have small injections from various government departments such as the Welsh Office, Scottish Office and European Union, in the case of regional language programming such as Welsh or Scots Gaelic. For instance, the popular Welsh soap opera Pobl Y Cum (Valley People) is made by the BBC but broadcast on independent station S4C supported by both advertising and government funding [PDF, Welsh and English].
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Yes, the BBC have a clear bias against parroting the "message of the day" Mr Blair and his cohorts are always trying to push.
I think they also show a definate bias towards serious reporting and providing intelligent, independant comment on the facts and opionions they gather during the course of their reports.
Yes in UK. Local government is usually know as the 'corporation'.
What most Americans think of as a Corporation we call a [Public|Private] Limited Company.
Yet another ecample being divided by a common language.
According this article Megaprovider is the bad-guy. Don't know whether this is the case or not, but at BBC they seem to forget the following.
If you perform a whois on the domain beautifulwomentodate.com, you see false address information and 4 DNS servers. All DNS servers are 'on' the domain CATRAMINA.COM which is owned by "Global Hosting Solutions".
ONE of the 4 DNS servers has IP address 217.21.117.88 which is owned by "CyberAngels". I can imagine Cyberangels would allow a hosting party to host a DNS server, don't you?
This is all involvement of Cyberangels/Megaprovider and the BBC needs to spend like 3 paragraphs on this and even provide (in my eyes) wrong information? I expected more accurate information from BBC.
Yet this does not answer why Martin didn't answer calls or explain his involvement in Cyberangels, but I can imagine he founded Cyberangels and then pulled away his hands and therefor tells he has nothing to do with it or whatsoever... I leave this open for your own opinion.
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers.
Marcel
Daxy's Networking Blog
If you tell them "The names Bond, James Bond."
...is actually considered "unreliable."
Of late, the paper has been mostly in the news for its inaccuracies.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
What would happen if everyone when spammed actually tried to make an order without actually intending to buy anything? A coordinated mass buyfest? Make it so unprofitable to sell via spam by causing massive losses through non-payment?
Perhaps that might stem the tide?
bevelander not the innocent party now thats the understatement of the year.
previously this character used to be primerily known for his domain stealing practices. aside from that i spoke to some folks on irc about a year back who basicly told me the fuck should be put away it seems this individual has a hard time keeping his hands of of other peoples servers and protects a number of friends / employees whom are just a bunch of pathetic scriptkiddies
I was once on the trail of a Super-Zonda in the forests of the great american north west. I followed it droppings. The creature must have become constipated because I lost track of it after about 30 miles.
This is certainly a crime under the UK Computer Misuse Act 1990. The fact that fact this guy is Dutch and opperated from the Netherlands is likely little protection since this law is besed on EU Treaty obligations and therefore very similar laws will exist throught the EU. In addition the EU has very comprehensive extradition policy.
And you have not only the right, but the ability to block spam.
I have to disagree on the second part of this sentence. I do NOT have the ability to block spam. I have half-assed means of TRYING to with filtering, but because spammers are for the most part deceitful with their headers and/or subject lines, it's a hit-or-miss proposition.
Spare me the whitelisting bullshit. It doesn't work in a business context.
http://cam1.megaprovider.nl/view/view.shtml
It's because the BBC is independent from Government that we can get spats like this, where the BBC very publicly say, in effect, that the Prime Minister lied to Parliament about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, and it's because of the BBC's independence that it can refuse to back down despite the most severe pressure from the government.
So, you know, let's hear it for the BBC and let's hear it for the License Fee. It's because the license fee is hypothecated - a tax paid by the people directly to an independent organisation - that we have at least one high quality media publisher with the utmost journalistic integrity which can call a sleazy and corrupt government to account, as it is doing now over the lies which led us into an illegal and unjustified war, and as it did under the Tories about MPs taking bribes.
A government run broadcaster could not do this, because the government could tell them to shut up, and cut off their funds if they didn't. A commercial broadcaster would find it much harder to do this, because the big commercial interests which pay for advertising don't want the boat to be rocked.
The BBC is, let's face it, one of the most independent, one of the most honest, one of the most fair broadcasters in the world. In a world where most media is in the hands of a very few commercial interests, mostly with fairly noxious political agendas, having one which is answerable only to the public is a very good thing in my opinion.
Long live the license fee!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
It might just be that s/he has a mail server in her/his home. In that case, s/he didn't FETCH anything. It all came to her/him.
The BBC provide some evidence to back this up, and are not known for rash accusations
Yes, thanks to the BBC's insightful investigative reporting, I know now that the Pfc. Lynch rescue was a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. Military, and that Israel attacks Palestinians with poisonous gases.
Some programers are so lazy. It looks like you can type any number into the url.... But more importantly the pool amount doesn't seem to change.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
I think what we need is a website that will offer a spammer-death-pool. Ante your nickle into the pot and the person that can most accurately "guess" the exact circumstances of the spammer's demise (exact time and means of death) takes the pot...perhaps a bonus for the person that first tracked down the spammer too.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Dan Bernstien (of qmail fame) has a proposal for just such a thing. I don't think any software has been written for it, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
The spammer's name was Rodona Garst. Several sites have mirrors of the original site you're thinking of.
Actually people are depeering Megaprovider at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, and there seems to be some more info at www.planet.nl about this (in dutch however)
-- Cliff Albert
Now if only moronic programs like the ActiveX porxy didn't default to wide open.
/me wishing for the days of public lynchings!
AnalogX isn't a moronic program. Programs are not moronic. The coder of AnalogX is moronic, and if there's a catagory, CRIMINALLY moronic.
AnalogX has cause more network abuse problems than 10 of the worst viruses put together.
(I do like "porxy" !! heh heh)
The alleged perpetrator in the article (Martijn Bevelander) was hailed as a young Bill Gates in dutch media in 1999. A popular newspaper (Telegraaf, think of The Sun, not of The Sunday Times) ran an article (dutch), quoting the 19yo: "Even at primary school I announced I was going to be famous & rich!"
In other news (dutch) today, Bevelander denies being involved with the spammers' front, Cyberangels. He threatens the BBC (boy, will they be scared) with litigation, "our resources to end this nonsense are endless." Which is remarkable, as his company went broke in 2002.
However, simple checks by Webwereld (public files at the local chamber of commerce) reveal a link to MegaProvider, Bevelander's current set-up. Bevelander, who claimed earlier to be an investor in the spammers' operation, now dismisses this as "something from his past."
--
It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
And you effectively gave the recipe for spammer wannabes to do the same thing pro spammers do. :)
j/k. I wondered how they did it. Now I know.
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
Claiming they somehow force mail onto your computer is technically incorrect.. that's my point.
The system itself does not have a mechanism for deciding what to accept or not... so when you say "Gimme all the mail, Mr. Mail server, that you have waiting for me.". That's joe average, and what he sees.
if you run a mail server.. fair enough, you don't control what mail you get.. if it's addressed correctly, it gets by. That's the design of the system from the beginning.
Now, I'm no spam advocate. I hate spam. I do what I can to filter it out, without wasting too much of my own time. But I think the solutions to spam need to be technical, not political. The reason spam exists is because the system does not fundamentally distinguish spam from non spam. You set up a mail server to accept mail from anyone, and you get some mail you don't like.. that's life.
Now, as for a DOS attack, I suspect perhaps you haven't been the victim of a DOS attack, or else you had some REALLY SUPER UNDEAD MALICOUS spammers from HELL.. because I run a few mail servers, and deal with spam.. and while spam is annoying, moreso because of the users whining than the spam itself, it's nothing compared to being under a DOS attack.
I won't address your first to paragraphs, because I agree with them, mostly.
Technical Solution vs. Political Solution. I agree that the wrong political solution would be bad, and the right technical solution would be great. I disagree that there doesn't have to be some politics to the solution though. The answer to computer cracking is both technical and political (technology to protect yourself and law when the technology isn't keeping up).
Denial of Service Attack. The users that I support are mainly a small set of intellegent people I allow on my systems. They, their spouses and children, know the game, and they appreciate the problem of spam. They don't complain much. The steps I take against spam amount to 3-5 hours a day. Not because I enjoy it, but because if I don't bother, mail becomes so unusable that it'd become worthless (I'm not saying that it just about isn't for me, but others still derive utility from it). In that 3-5 hours a day, I read articles on spam, read up on new techniques, install software that would improve the utility of the system without undue impact to the users, and take an ever increasing corpus of spam and do what I might with it, developing more software internally to take specific action against spam.
I used to spend as much time on security as I now do on spam. It's a zero sum game. Nobody is winning. From the beginning of the year until now, I block a couple hundred additional spam messages a week than I did the week before, but we also get 1000 more total then we did the week before. Last week, at the sendmail level, I blocked 2205 attempts to send spam (not dnsbl, but known bad spammer ips that have passed through our system). Last week spamassassin blocked around 5,000 spams from reaching people's inbox (but saved them for ipaddr blocking). Bayesian filtering in Mozilla and Macintosh Mail took care of another 1000 emails, again saved for ipaddr blocking. Still, about 2000 slipped through those nets. I'm about to try greylisting and putting challenge/response on those mailboxes that want it.
Then there are the joe jobs to deal with.
Malicious? By definition, that is what the spammers are. Penile pill, and worse, emails to children just learning to type.
Undead? They don't seem to sleep, but then when there are enough of them, it really doesn't matter.
I realize that DoS attacks are no fun, and have been through both attack, and sideaffects thereof, on my own systems and people I have worked and consulted for. The purpose of the attack is to deny the owner/operator the utility of their own computers. Some of it can be really bad when it is going on and really hard to recover from. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider spam a DDoS attack. It just started several years ago and hasn't yet finished. There is no easy patch or firewall rule to fix it (other than whitelisting ips which pretty much destroys the utility of the Internet), and the other solutions are just stopgaps to some solutions that are still pretty far out.
FWIW.
RM
"UK Parliament Clears Govt of Misleading on Iraq" - Reuters/Washington Post.
"Campbell cleared by MPs over Iraq dossier" - Daily Telegraph.
"Dossier report clears Campbell" - The Guardian.
"Iraq weapons claims criticised" - BBC headline.
668: Neighbour of the Beast