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."

Comments

Legislate Out The Source

[Anonymous Coward]

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.