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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."
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.
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.
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!