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Another Worm Targets Anti-Spam Sites
kevinvee writes "Yahoo! is reporting about the next battle of Spam Houses versus Spamhauses. This time, its W32/Mimail-L receiving the attention. "It's the third Mimail variation to come after us, except this one is trying to do more," said Steve Linford, founder of The Spamhaus Project. Apparently this reincarnation comes as an attachment offering naked photographs. Once infected, a follow-up e-mail is sent to the user stating that a CD containing child pornography will be delivered to their postal address. "These guys write trojan (viruses), they carry out DDOS attacks and they get their money through selling stolen credit cards and spamming," Linford said."
What we need to do is find out the physical addresses of these nice individuals and try to reason with them using advanced negotiation tools, such as baseball bats and tire irons.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
It's absolutely insane. They won't stop 'til they've destroyed email.
It's melodramatic, but: spammers really have declared war on email, and the Internet and its users as a whole. They're fucking with email, they're fucking with DNS, they're sending out viruses to infect users and spread more filth, and they're trapped in this huge positive feedback loop that I'm desperately afraid won't end. They pump out millions of emails which get ignored so they pump out more which gets them blocked so they pump out more to get around that and they start attacking their opponents and now the volume of spam is so high they need to pump out even more just to get any sort of return...
Rationally, I think the only way around it is to attack the economics of spam, as has been suggested by many much smarter than me.
But really, what I want is revenge.
Carousel is a lie!
I've just received a fake "mailer daemon" rejection message with a viral attachment; although my a/v program caught it, I can see this tactic catching even the most suspicious of us...
There's a term for a coalition engaged in the act of making money through the use of intimidation and illegal acts: organized crime.
The spammers are exactly the same as the mafia.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Mastercard, wait, even better AmEx issues a card with the same idea. The card is used once in response to a single spam. The card is then cut up but not cancelled. Hand the card numbers and the billing address over on a platter.
When the card is used again, set your phasers to sue. The beneficiary of the card's usage can either be charged with fraud, etc. or roll on their superior. Pass the buck up the ladder until you can jail a spammer not on the basis of spam but of felony(ies).
Of course, this assumes that you can find a "member magnifier" offer that isn't even looking to send you Sucrosa. Still, it might be worth a shot as a low-cost investment with a good potential for a high yield.
The same idea could be used for eBay and PayPal scams. It's not as if none of us have gotten those "Please enter your password in this email and click submit button" spams. I wonder if this is already done. I'm a smart guy, but I'm still just another geek on /.. It seems some well-compensated theft prevention exec would have started doing this a long time ago if it would work. Though honestly, I don't see any problems with it myself.
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
As promised, there's a new tool in town. Project Web Form Flooder is still in beta, but it's functional in flooding spammer's websites with plausible data. Java source code only right now, but I'd imagine the ./ crowd can deal with that.
If we flood spammer's websites with garbage data, maybe, just maybe we'll do a little to remove the profit motive in spamming, and once there's no money in it it'll end.
Isn't it time we stopped crying and started doing something?
It's easy to say "don't open obvious spam at all" and "never open an attachment" and "never click on a URL in an email."
Personally, my middle-aged brain only functions at about a four-nines reliability level, meaning that if I deal with thirty pieces of email a day, about once a year I'll accidentally do something STUPID.
Like pressing "reply" before I've finished composing my mail. Or replying to all when I only meant to reply to one. Or replying to a list when I only meant to reply to one person on a list. Or thinking that PayPal might really have sent me an email. Or opening a foreign attachment. Typically I realize that I've goofed approximately five hundred milliseconds after performing the mouse click that commits me to the imprudent action.
(It doesn't help that I actually have real human friends who do send me email message with subject lines that are blank, or consist of the single word "Hi!" or "Meeting.")
I am sure that you never ever do anything STUPID, and I fully agree with you that someone as STUPID as I deserves to have my computer infected with viruses.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Cannot resist this one...
OK kids, sit down and let uncle bubba explain this one for you. One, if you see something once, it might be a coincidence. Twice means that maybe lighting is hitting the outhouse twice. This is the third one of these, and with each successive version, the methods and operations of the virus are getting more effective and efficient. That means at least two developers were able to reverse engineer and increase the efficiency of the payload of the virus, OR someone is monitoring what is going on and making improvements. Tell you what, I will let you think about that one for a sec...
We also have the comments from the spammers themselves. Many have come out into the open and said that anti-spam orgs declared war on them, and that they would fight back. Do you honestly think that this is just a chance happening?
I guess it could be, I mean, you could have some slashdotter waging a disinformation campaign targeting anti-spammers to piss everyone off...
Oh, and too the nuts want to sue Microsoft under the same pretenses as suing gun manufactures...dude, spammers are equal opportunity abusers...they are abusing open protocols as much as they are using OS holes to propagate this crap. So unless you want to sue Berkley or something like that...
Spammers evil...viruses evil...censorship evil...censoring spam ev...WAIT!...good...
"We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
The problem of spam is not caused by the freedom of email, any more than murder is caused by the availability of knives and other weapons. It is too easy for technically-minded people to see spam as a technical problem, which is to be solved by replacing the existing mail system with something more restrictive. However, the spam problem is not spontaneously generated by the mail system, just as knives do not go around murdering people. Spamming, like murder, is a human action that certain humans choose to engage in.
It is, of course, useful to use technology to make harmful actions more difficult. Locking up valuables makes theft more difficult; hiring bodyguards makes assassinations more difficult. However, we do not pretend that technology should make theft or murder impossible, or that the world should be transformed into a padded cell so that everyone is technologically prevented from doing anything wrong. Instead we deter and punish crime through education and law enforcement. Technology can reduce the likelihood and impact of harmful human actions, but we cannot use it as a replacement for social responses.
Regardless of whether particular legislatures have passed laws which specifically address spam, we recognize spamming as a lawless and criminal endeavor. Spammers co-opt the property of others against the will of the property owners. (Note that this is worse than simply using that property without permission.) Just as gangs protect their core unlawful enterprises with further crimes such as murdering rivals and bribing police, spammers have come to use cracking, viruses, and DDoS to protect their core activity. Structurally, spam is just like other sorts of lawless action which we see as the proper jurisdiction of law enforcement rather than technological kludgery.
There is no shortage of evidence, gathered from public sources and fully admissible in court, that particular spammers are engaged in criminal actions such as the above. Contrary to common belief, these spammers are not in "third-world nations"; they are in Western nations such as the USA, Canada, and the UK -- nations which have broadly functional legal systems, and nations whose Internet users are the chief recipients of spam as well. Volunteers have already carefully collected this information in the Registry of Known Spam Operations. What is needed is twofold: (1) Funding for law enforcement to go after the known criminal enterprises; (2) Further litigation by major victims of spam, such as large ISPs, against those who are victimizing them.
(Inevitably, in every thread about spam, someone proposes a solution with one or more flaws. This is a handy form that passes the lameness filter and that can be reused for all such posts to save time! It does not specifically address all possible flaws and may be expanded in future versions.)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!