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NZ Spammer Shutdown Makes Big Difference
lump writes "A notorious spammer, based in New Zealand, who had his name and other personal info released first in a national newspaper, and then on the web, has shut down his operation, citing harassment. What interests me about this case is that, in the 5 or 6 days since he has supposedly stopped operating, I personally have had one (1) spam email, to an address which had previously averaged around fifty per day. Colleagues report a similar reduction in spam. All I can say is 'excellent.' Hate to say it, but in this case, vigilante type action seems to have had the desired result. This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing."
Oops. we do that already I think...
Realistically though, is this something the US would want to adopt as a deterent? it seems to me way too open for abuse.
But let's suppose we could do that officially. Who is qualified to offically identify a spammer? How easy is it to detect a specific spammer (in terms of the skills required to get to right) and how easy is it to get the skills you'd need to do that? Not that Congress is going to authorize the establishment of an anti-spam unit...are they?
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Another theory... the group/guy who wrote SoBig is one of the biggest spam organisations.. and given the current FBI man hunt, is afraid to use his massive proxy network to spew crap out selling stuff cause it could eventually be traced back to him.
I.O.U One Sig.
Hate to say it, but in this case, vigilante type action seems to have had the desired result.
Why do you hate to say this ? If governments fail to do anything about spammers, possibly because they don't know how, the only option is vigilantism.
If the only way to stop these guys is to put their names in the paper or mention them on television shows, so be it.
Personally I wouldn't mind seeing them being dragged down the street to be tarred and feathered.
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
Before anyone flames or trolls this down, be realistic for a minute here, and I in no way am trying to justify anyone's actions, just stating facts. Does anyone protest when the menu guys flood your doorstep? No... What about when Target or some other megaconglomerate sends bs in the mail that you didn't ask for? doubtable. Spam is no different. Want to give me cost ratios go ahead and I'll do a breakdown in sanitation costs if you think mail and menus cost nothing. Not to mention a possible fine you could get for having litter you didnt leave in front of your house.
So ask yourself, if you were in a business and were told how to run it which was against the way you were running it, wouldn't you leave, what if someone was threatening you because it does happen wouldn't you quit while you were ahead too?
MoFscker
Also, with various mail servers being swamped with SoBig mail, I don't think much spam can get through.
The bunch of worms have stopped and slowed lots of networks recently. Especially over the past 5-6 days. I would wait a bit before claiming a small victory.
I monitor my father's email as well as my own, since he was a bit naive when he started out on the internet and got his email address in a bunch of spam lists.
Since the NZ guy got shut down, he's had about 1 spam a day (in Australia, close to NZ). I've been using Mailwasher to bounce all his spam, figuring eventually his email would show up in the spam lists as being dead, and hopefully being removed (other than those lists that don't care who they spam).
So it would be interesting to see if we can get a sense of the list this guy used, based on geographic proximity to NZ. I figured that maybe he was getting his names from closer to home, but I could be wrong.
The spam had so many different email addresses as the reply to field that I wouldn't have thought it all came from one guy!
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
I have a feeling that the large-time spammers don't really sit around r00+ing boxes to spam with. These guys are transfering gigabytes per day of spam. They are doing so with the blessings and services of hosting companies. The only reason a hosting company has for shutting down a spammer is that they've been blackholed. This is the only thing that works. I have NO pity for folks who also have hosting from these scumbags who are collateral damage. Find a new hosting or colo company or feel the wrath.
The different governments ESPECIALLY the US federal government feels that spam isn't their problem. The only recourse are semi-vigalante operations such as blacklists. God bless 'em.
(P.S. Don't say 'well, how did we know?' You learn when your clients can't get their mail or whatever. You then switch hosting co's to a less scummy operation. Vote with dollars people.)
The original poster wrote that once the spammer who became known shut down his operation, saw a 98% reduction makes an interesing point: if we knew who was sending the spam and who was profiting, we the community could send him enough hate-mail and other forms of revenge for the richer ones to be more content with the money they've already made while the poorer ones might take up more noble pursuits.
It's a pity that there is, as yet, no elegant, widely-known mechanism for finding the people who are the source of spam. God, one of *them* unable to use email without having to learn to use complex filters to get his messages.
I would *pay* to see that.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
I remember years ago when I responded to the footer "Click here to unsubscribe". Little did I know that was a way spammers varified email addresses. It must have taken me off the $20 for 1 million email addresses, and placed me on the $250 premium list.
Kinda like the footer that spammers had which cliamed their email complied with some HR#1342 blah blah blah. That is when I became suspicious, because I knew something that passed in the house alone was not law.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It's not illegal to sign someone up for a mailing list in most countries. It might be harrassment if I do it a bunch.
But if we each sign every spammer up for one paper thing and enter their website contact email for one mailing list, they'll be DOS'ed and each contributor would not be harrassing.
And since we have not communicated, we would not be conspiring, either.
So this is justice and it's it's legal.
On the other hand, we have a myriad of compromised Windows boxes sending out new copies of SoBig.F, and poorly configured corporate mail scanners bouncing them back to their faked addresses. All this adds up to a massive strain on ISP's mail gateways, some of which are going to be used to send spam. I suspect the spam is just being slowed to a crawl by the sheer volume of SoBig.F and normal spam inconvenience levels will be restored soon. My money's on September 10th...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I've just started getting hit by the latest email worm/virus/trojan thing (some jerkoff with my real email address has just gotten themselves infected). And judging by the lack of response from my personal address' email server I'm not alone. This could be the resurgance predicted as people got back to work after the (long?) weekend. Either way, spam is probably down because email servers are overloaded more than peoples' inboxes are.
If the spammers get as much virus-bounces as I do (about 1000 over last 24 hours), they figure out that it doesn't make sense to send any spam at the moment. It will simply get lost among the other trash.
I set up bogofilter to mark Bogosity in two categories -- viruses and spam. Then I color the index in my mutt accordingly and I get nice overview. The virus to spam ratio is about 25 : 1. The spam to legal mail ratio is about 3 : 1.
OK this is great news. One weapon that works wonders against spammers is by making them known. The closer you can get to making a spammer walk around his/her neighborhood with the word "SPAMMER" on their foreheads, the better the results.
Eventually, all of these individuals will stop after they meet the fed up people who will threaten bodily harm or worse because of spam.
The world becomes spam free. Being a spammer is just too dangerous. That is, too dangerous for anyone but the mob.
Then we'll be up shit creek.
Perhaps too much of a bit of wishful thinking there?
I hope so. One brutal public execution of a spammer by a wild mob would stop spam overnight.
Another strategy might be to bait psychopaths with spam mails "look what this guy sent your momma" then direct them to the spammer's residence.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Nope, I had 200 emails to delete this a.m. So how do I find the guy sending me all this shit?
I've done lots of detective forays and unsubscriptions but the spam just keeps coming.
I'm thinking it would be useful if I could forward say a hundred spams to an address which would analyze them with other people's spam and figure out the top targets for detective work. Then when anybody gets enough energy/anger to do some calling around everybody benefits.. a kind of spammer scalping engine.
Wasn't there a story about some guy in Argentina recently? Go for it!
I installed qurb http://www.qurb.com about two months ago, and it's caught 432 spam, not one of which has plopped in my inbox...
:)
:)
It's a challenge and response whitelist system for outlook, and I'm hooked. Shame it ain't freeware, but the trial version still hasn't quit on me... I may fork out yet
The spammers ain't going away, might as well treat 'em like lepers and not even listen to 'em
"P.S. Don't say 'well, how did we know?' You learn when your clients can't get their mail or whatever. You then switch hosting co's to a less scummy operation. Vote with dollars people."
Yes because this is always finicially and pratically feasible. Its not always just 'scummy' hosters that get blocked either. Not to mention that spam blacklists are notoriously militant, spiteful, prone to running vendettas and they are answerable to nobody. They have been known do stupid things like block entire countries. It should also be noted as a hosting company that once you have eliminated the spammers on your network it is no guarantee that you will be un-blacklisted.
This is a case of it doesn't directly effect me so I am all for it. Then of course you will be crying foul when it does. Probably complaining the loudest too.
Problem is this guy is in a country where even if they threw the book at him they would let him off because the thought of having the book thrown at him would be too stressful.
But I'm willing to put up NZ$1000 of my very own money to get this guy in front of the courts and the reporter that turned him in will make sure it stays news.
This guy has costs Kiwi businesses millions of dollars in bandwidth costs. He sells illegal drugs. He advertises adult items to children. There ought to be something to bust him on.
He claims he has reformed but if he had, he would be naming his associates.
This got me to thinking. The thing I hate most about spam is that there is no way to contact the seller to let them know you're not interested--ever. When you annoy people and give them no power to respond, they'll eventually come after you and your kids. I'm always amazed to find that spammers don't know that people are angry about their behavior, but I figure they've never heard from someone who they sent a message to.
Maybe they just think their "customers" are the people who give them money ... then what do you even call the people who receive the spam?
I guess I'm also amazed to think that nobody can come up with good legislation. Yes, we should be able to send messages anonymously--including business people--but the limit should be when that correspondence becomes harassment.
It's like if you put a sign in someone's yard--anonymously, without asking--and they tore it down, very few people would compain (at least not vehemently.) If you put ten signs in their yard every day for years, they'd probably kill you if they caught you. Is the answer to make a law banning putting a sign in someone's yard?
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
You have obviously never been on the receiving end of a blacklist. I look at the mailing lists and all I see are a bunch of jerks acting as if the provider is always at fault, and that everybody has a choice who their provider is.
/24 block was the local Catholic School having an open proxy (NOT an open relay), but no reported spam.
In the past week, I've had some messages start bouncing. A lookup at http://openrbl.org/ shows 0 positives on my IP, yet for some reason I'm getting bounces claiming both SPEWS and Osirusoft are rejecting me. It would be nice to find out what's going on, but both of their websites are unaccessible. The only reference I could locate to others in my
So is my ISP being lax in their anti-spam policy? I could only find 1 report of a known spammer operating from my ISP's address block in the past year, and that one appeared to have been picked up from their purchase of another provider. Sounds to me like they are doing their job.
And don't give me any of this BS about 'well the ISP had their chance to shut down the troublemakers before they were blacklisted.' Where the hell was *MY* chance to do something before *I* got blacklisted?
I've been using ordb and spamhaus to filter incoming mail for the past severl months, but had never really read any of the mailing lists to see what was going on. Quite frankly I'm amazed at the attitudes. The scenario that comes to mind is this... On the block where I live, someone who I have never met gets a DUI while driving (someone spams). The court orders them to attend classes about drunk driving (send a message to ISP to get rid of the problem). The person never attends those classes, so the city takes away the driver's license of EVERYONE on the block (blacklisted). Of course, nobody on my block has any idea what was going on, and if we had, we may have been able to put some pressure on the individual to make changes, but no, the city doesn't care about that.
In my case (with the discovered open proxy), it's a little more incredible... A neighbor lends his car to someone else, and even though that person drove safetly and there were no reported incidents, our whole block has restricted anyway.
I'm going to keep using RBL's on my mail server, but I'm going to do a little more research into who I'm using. It's a great concept, but I've seen too many people on huge power trips now to explicitly trust what they are telling me should be restricted.
I don't know how you would determine that "most spammers use Outlook or Outlook Express."
Certainly, most spamblower software forges Outlook MUA header tags, but it doesn't take much effort to figure out that the formatting of the spam is inconsistent with Outlook's abilities. I've got an archive of 2074 spams I've received (as of this morning) and the majority of it appears to have been generated with spamware optimized for that purpose, not with a commercial MUA like Outlook.
Think about it, Outlook is too slow, inefficient and buggy to be worth a spammer's time. Except perhaps as their own personal MUA, but I don't have any way to know that, since I don't receive personal mail from spammers, just spam from their spamblowers.
On the other claw, spammers are using viral techniques more and more frequently, and it's said that they frequently use virii to recruit the zombie nodes, so it's pretty likely that they are contributing to the problem in one way or another.
Because the authors of virii call them virii, and not some Klingon word. The word "viruses" refers to biological organisms, and the distinction is valid and desirable.
Do you insist on calling eight-bit quantities "bites" since there was no English word "byte" before computer programmers decided to make one?
... over the spammer whose doing the job he was hired to do. So, digging deeper in that vein we should be looking at the companies who are hiring these spam-a-jammas and start these types of tactics right at the source of the income (or right at the company themselves).
Is there a place already where we can add to a database of the companies who hire spammers?
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
So you're saying it'd be OK to murder the spammer too?
Let say this spammer sends out a 6 million messages a day, causeing a million people to spend ten seconds deleting the message. That's 416 hours of lost time per day - do that for a year, and it's as if 10 people lost all the time in their natural born lives.
It's it right that he can do this? Ten lives were lost, just spread out over many people.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Part of the description of SoBig.F includes:
"The worm searches the local hard drive for files with the extensions TXT, HTML, EML, HTM, WAB and DBX. The files are used to extract a list of recipient email addresses that will be used by the worm to send infected emails."
(From Sophos.com)
So if someone who visited a page that you had posted in and had the HTML from Slashdot in their cache you could get the emails. Nobody need to have sent you spam or have that email on a list for you to get those messages, only that someone visited a page with your email in it that was retained in a browser cache. (After all, the spammers were not using much, or you would not have seen an increase in messages above the noise.)
This is a good arguement for keeping the caches in WinTel boxes cleared out, fewer targets.
(I think Slashdot has an option to not display your email address, turning that off may help prevent such messages in the future.)
I understood that there is no attestation at all as to how 2nd declension Latin neuters might form their plural; that is, there is no instance of any of the three known ones (virus, pelagus, vulgus) appearing in the plural:
http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html
In short, noone knows what the Latin plural is.
"virii" is possible, but on the other hand, following the example of deabus, "virus" might have a special plural differentiating it from "viri", even if the plural of pelagus & vulgus was pelagi and vulgi (which is not known).
I may get flamed for proposing this, but on my way to work this morning, I thought of something: In the current climate of anti-privacy that we are experiencing, doesn't the flurry of spam make it harder for someone to spy on your email? I mean, if there's that much crap a potential spy has to dredge through, isn't it harder to pull out meaninful stuff? We have a hard enough time filtering the good stuff out of our own email, imagine what a privacy invader has to go through when they're looking at many people's email.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
I can guarantee you that most spammers are NOT using Outlook/Express. They use software especially designed to spam.
What confuses me is how posts like this get rated so highly even though they are based on obvious gross factual inaccuracies. There are several posts beneath it with 1-2 ratings that are much more intelligent.
> No, actually it's not. There is no such word in either Latin or English. In Latin, "virus" is a collective noun, like 'butter.'
Virus is NOT a Latin word. The Latins didn't have computers! Sheesh!
I could go with corporal punishment, but the deprivation of property without due process is what I find problematic.
Engineering and the Ultimate