Slashdot Mirror
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."
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'
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.
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!
Many have tried but its proven very difficult to get really up close to the viagra spammers.
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.
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)
And we'll finally find a good use for the (offline version) Slashdot effect.
Exactly. The other day I was watching the Beeb's news channel on cable in Australia and they carried a report that suggested that America DIDN'T use the power of lollipops and sunshine to expel the demonic Saddam Hussein from Iraq. Imagine!
Time to open up a can of spa^H^H^H whoop-ass on him!!
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.)
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.
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
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.
"The BBC ... are not known for rash accusations"
;-)
I'm not sure Alastair Campbell would agree...