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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."
Somebody should tell the Israelis. They think the BBC is biased, and their reporting is akin to nazi propaganda.
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.
I doubt that will work out all that well... according to the article, spammers rely on 1 sale per million spam emails. I personally know that the "stupid" or "has-a-clue" ratio is WAY lower than that.
My personal observations are that it's closer to being 1 in a hundred people are "stupid" or "clueless".
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
$0.02 (CDN)
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.
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.
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
They're not publicly funded (from tax pounds). If you want to choose not to receive television pictures at home, then you don't have to pay a licence fee (which goes to fund the BBC). They get their money from television licences (about approx US$160/year for colour). There used to be radio licences too (years ago). They still have their own agenda though - although you're right - they aren't as concerned with profit as a business would be. The C in BBC does stand for Corporation though....
Video Game cheats, hints a
They're not publicly funded (from tax pounds)
In name only. The license fee is effectively a tax on ownership of a television, since every owner of a television must pay it and persistent failure to pay can result in jail time. If it walks like a duck.....
I believe that even if one can only receive satellite broadcasts, one still has to have a license fee.
If one could own a television, and avoid the license fee by not watching BBC channels, then it would not be a tax.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
I believe that even if one can only receive satellite broadcasts, one still has to have a license fee.
Well, duh! The BBC produces about 12 satellite TV channels, which (like all other BBC TV and radio channels) carry no advertising. Do you think they give them away for free too?
I think it might have more to do with the unique and peculiar phenomenon called 'Radio 4'. You have to understand, this is a radio station like no other in the world. Its news coverage makes most broadsheet newspapers of international standing look like supermarket tabloids; its factual programming ranges from farming to education to natural history to technology to science to history to art without missing a beat; it has been the starting point for some of the most innovative comedy ever to come out of britain; it broadcasts a daily soap opera set in a small country village that has been running for over 50 years (and whose theme tune can mysteriously be instantly recited by any british person even if they've never heard it); it carries the shipping forecast of the british meteorological office; and it features no advertising or jingles at all (unless you can call the sound of 'big ben' chiming the hour, or 'the pips' (a strange sequence of electronic beeps that mark the hour), or the national anthem at closedown, jingles...)
The point is, investigating internet spam is as much to be expected from radio four as interviewing a man who's devoted his life to the study of finches, or broadcasting a group of grown men sitting in a theatre reciting the names of london underground stations in accordance with some arcane set of rules.
They probably followed the investigation with a reading from a novel by Hanif Kureishi and a half hour documentary on the history of beekeeping. And then the shipping forecast.
Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.... easterly, becoming more northerly later, rising.
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?
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.