Slashdot Mirror
Following the Spam Trail
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC's Bob Sullivan doggedly follows a spam trail from Alabama to Argentina to find out who actually benefits from spam. The beneficiaries aren't necessarily the pasty faced, high school drop out industrial spammers we have gotten to know, but well known companies."
Now what does MSNBC need with that information, in relation to your experiences with spam? Seems fishy to me...
Well, if they want to do a story on them, they might actually want to be able to CONTACT you. And let's hope that major news organizations require that people who report things to them are actually, REAL PEOPLE. Not just random e-mail addresses signed by Haha G. Ottcha
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
After IC Marketing received our data, it sold our information to a firm named Infoclear Marketing in Dallas, which then sold it to Mleads, which in turn sold it to Quicken, according to Newman.
Infoclear immediately terminated its contract with IC Marketing when it heard about the spam offense, said Patrick Thurmond, who identified himself as a founder of Infoclear.
Doesn't it sound a lot like InfoClear and IC (coincidence?) are actually the same company, but can appear to 'sever ties' whenever anyone anti-spam starts nosing around.. sounds like a nice setup to me, and the investigators won't implicate poor infoclear when tracing this back.
Just my $0.02.
Thinko
"I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a bat'leth contest. They will not concern us again."
What's that you say? Backbones don't police spam across their networks, spam that sucks up huge amounts of bandwidth, which they can charge people for? Whoa!
Next at 11, employees who are responsible for self-policing timecard policies are ripping off employers!
(seriously though- it's time we started taking major networks to task, like refusing to route packets coming from them, or refusing to send traffic to them. Watch how fast UUnet takes care of spammers, when customers find they suddenly can't get to sites. Pretty much the ONLY thing these days that separates backbones is how reliable they are- even a slight decrease in reliability, even just perceived or threatened, could have an astounding effect. Think of all the fuss SCO is causing to see the possibilities.)
Please help metamoderate.
If the big business did it directly, you would have an easy target and could hit them pretty hard and fast to stop it. This way they have a large number of layers of seperation(deniability) available. As the one company in the article said, they canned the account of the person who spammed to get the lead, but that person was probably already signed up under 15 other names and loses accounts once or twice a week. But that company has deniability, and can claim they took action, knowing that it was worthless...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
Interesting, if what the article says about the 20 dollar fee is true. Perhaps we can end spam by answering it.
Facinating.
The story ends with the conclusion that the existence of spam is the consumers fault. The assertion is that if spam didn't generate responses and, in turn, revenue, these business interests wouldn't bother causing it to be created, however indirectly.
That logic is hard to argue with, but I have an additional way to fault the consumer. Why does the consumer continue to tolerate the open sewer that is contemporary email? It's not just spam. Millions of these sheeple have been infected with viruses sent via email. Spam and viruses, and a seaming endless ability to tolerate large quantities of both...
One would think that after enough of this crap occurred, consumers would eventually consider dealing with it. RTFA to discover that you can't count on ISPs to deal with it. They value spammers and the extra money they're willing to pay. RTFA to discover that respectable companies participate via a web of indirection and plausible deniability. The only thing we have is the end user. If the end user isn't willing to deal with the problem, no one will.
If the end user was willing to deal with the problem, then it becomes a simple matter. All that would be needed is a requirement that senders provide a verifiable signature in all messages, and easy to use white lists to remember the 'ok' parties. If the end user were willing to a.) obtain a cert that allows them to sign and b.) tolerate the need to not blindly open mail that hadn't been placed on their white-list previously, spam would not exist.
The key here is the end user. Until they come around spam is inevitable.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
In advertising there are divisions much like the white red black hats of hackers. Often times a company will submit a block of money to an advertising group, which will then employ dozens of different strategies. Often times, these techniques are not follow known or endorsed by the sponsoring company.
Take for instance when IBM launched a "edgy" campaign where peace signs were spray painted on the sidewalks of SanFran. Or some TV show that quietly advertised by sending a non-existant football team to various locations claiming to have one state finals, when in actuallity, it was a ploy to get name recognition.
Spam is simply a new form of information dissemination. It is not Microsoft or any other giant who is actively pushing this, but marketing and advertising firms who are supported by them. So you have to make a distinction because the big advertisers are linked to just about every big company.
Anyway...
Dream on.
If the big business did it directly, you would have an easy target and could hit them pretty hard and fast to stop it. This way they have a large number of layers of seperation(deniability) available. As the one company in the article said, they canned the account of the person who spammed to get the lead, but that person was probably already signed up under 15 other names and loses accounts once or twice a week. But that company has deniability, and can claim they took action, knowing that it was worthless...
/. about who was the most powerful with multination corps being one of the choices. Hmm........
Read that a couple times and think mafia, not spam.
A while back their was a poll on
Well, yeah, we have already figured that out. But the article isn't for us, it's for the 85% or so of users who don't even know how to block spam or why they get any. I think Slashdotters take their computer literacy for granted sometimes. :)
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
There are a number of possibilities. The most likely one being that the guy is either a crank or a hacker with a wierd sense of humor.
Another possibility is that there is some form of steganographic message being broadcast. This could be a signaling mechanism used to provide deniable communications from an 'owned' computer. Alternatively it might well be a genuine request for some form of parts. If you wanted to buy parts for some form of illegal weapon you might use this type of cimmunication to tell a quartermaster what is required.
The advantage of using a message that appears to bee from a kook is that people tend not to take kooks seriously (unless they get elected to office but that is another matter). On the other hand if you are serious about anti-terrorism you listen to so many kooks that it becomes a warning sign. The type of people who stick a bomb in a litter bin outside a McDonalds tend to be whacko jobs.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Every time I read an article about spam, I see a bunch of people promoting the spam filters on their system, or their ISP, or some other way of dealing with spam at the destination.
The only way to deal with spam is at the source. The only way to stop spammers is to keep them from sending their shite in the first place. As soon as it leaves their computer, it becomes an arms race--we get better filters, they figure out a new way around them, we tweak our filters again. Eventually the entire email system worldwide becomes one big armed camp, and that's BAD! Worse yet, I see people proposing we go straight to that end right now, as a solution.
We have to stop spammers from being able to spam, not stop the spam from reaching us.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I forgot to mention.. Everyone thinks spam is so aweful yet they have no idea how horrid anti spammers can be as well. Antis will resort to even illegal ways to attack spammers adn even legit optin mailers.