Slashdot Mirror
The Life of a Spammer
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an interesting article today about the life of a "small time" spammer. It is interesting to note that even a religiously zealous grandmother can mire our inboxes with junk." That's Flo Fox, of Slidell, LA.
Fox, Flo
127 Rue Acadian
Slidell, LA 70461-5203
(985) 646-2225
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
You can bet that this woman is a relative or trailer park neighbor of the "cajun spam gang" that's been operating in the area for awhile. I think most of them have gone out of business though.
Flo Fox, (985) 646-2225, 1517 Maplewood Dr, Slidell, LA 70458
i am not sure if this is the same person mentioned in the story but it was the address that came up in google
If it's off shore, she originates messags from there, and the bandwidth require would be satisfied with a 14.4k modem. Upload one message, message list stored off shore, fire.
So who does she get her lease line from in the U.S.? Or is all of this just typical spammer lies?
I occasionally get some at work (1-5 a week)
At home (with spamassassin, instead of the crappy, big$$ system we have at work) I get 1-5 a month that slip thru the net.
If there are any spamassassin developers reading this, thanks much!
tip - if you have a scoring system like spamassassin, set two thresholds. One which sends mail to the spam box, and a second, higher one which sends to /dev/null
:)
On my system, (spapassassin + spamass-milter) I file at 6, and reject mail at 14
I waited a while to ensure that the bayes was tuned properly before adding the reject rule, but if I didn't have it my mail'd be totally unusable...
If you don't have a scoring system, get one
So now we have an AARP member spamming. Does it make any difference to me? It doesn't matter if the theif is a grandma wearing a WWJD T-shirt or a young fella with a ski mask. Theft is theft, and a thief is a thief.
Whats she say to defend her theft - things like "....This (spam) lets the little guy compete". What does she think about the time, energy and costs small providers have to dish out to defend their network against SPAM? How many small guys have had their machines shut down because of false return addresses, or an onslaught of spam that makes mail services crawl? What about those small guys BUZZZZ Wrong answer grandma!
She doesn't stop there, she goes on to say the even more bizzare "When I defend what we do, I talk about free speech". I looked at the constitution to be sure and nowhere did it say "You may steal from others, and then force them to accept your speech into their homes". I believe the consitution protects speech, but doesn't force others to have to accept/listen to ones speech. The amendment is about government cesorship, NOT about theft of services to promote a get rich schemes. BUZZZZ Wrong answer grandma!
So she makes 2000 - 4000 / week. After several years of college I don't make 4k a week, but then again, even if I could improve my economic situation, my personal moral compass wouldn't allow me to what she does. Perhaps she needs to read the bible more. What was it again?? Thou shall not steal?? Thou shall not bear false witness?? - Stuff like that.
With 80% or more of all e-mail being spam, the signal to noise ratio is heading south fast. To stop spam you have to stop spammers.
Here is the towns website
http://www.slidell.la.us
Now can any one let me know which provider provides this type of person with access? I have some IP blocks to add to my blacklist.
According to information -
Flo Fox - Slidell LA
985 646 2225
I don't know if that number is correct - but it's publically listed.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I remember what happened to rodona garst:
t es.com-m irror/RodonasBreastSize.jpg
http://belps.freewebsites.com/
(lots of mirrors, the first one is dead, try pressing directly on the "Behind enemy lines" text)
I hope someone could do a rodona garst on this woman.
They even found a pic of her boobs:
http://www.spamshield.org/belps.freewebsi
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Dec-14 -Sun-2003/news/22615610.html
from ROKSO, Bill Wagggoner
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
So the obvious coutermeasure to spam is to make stolen addresses worthless.
Use spamgourmet and only give disposable addresses to businesses, web sites, forums and friends running Windows.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Clearly, Flo is making a passable living for herself, and so is the city. I just don't understand the spin.
Two weeks ago someone started spamming taiwan using my email address as the spoofed source. Now they are branching out to yahoo.com
I know this as I get all the bounce mail. Spammers get a lot of bounce mail, and 300+ mails an hour is enough to kill the inbox. Then there is all the 'stop spamming me' responses, or the 'j.user is out the office messages' -this is brutally hard to filter without destroying all useful content (like my own bounce mail)
So I have just been evicted from an email address (on my own domain) that I have had for five years, having to notify friends that is has moved, and generally suffer from trying to clean up the damage.
That is what spam does.
A1 E Services is Bruce Connelly and Flo Fox aka Mrs. Bruce Connelly.
& rq sdta=34331685D
A1E_Services (NETBLK-BRW-5021-A1ESERVICES)
1711 West Hall Ave
Slidell, LA 70460
US
Netname: BRW-5021-A1ESERVICES
Netblock: 67.96.78.0 - 67.96.79.255
Coordinator:
Hostmaster (ZB13-ARIN) hostmaster@broadwing.com
512-427-3700
Domain System inverse mapping provided by:
NS3.BROADWING.NET 216.140.16.252
NS4.BROADWING.NET 216.140.17.252
Connelly, Bruce (BC891-ARIN) a1esupport@aol.com
A1E SERVICES
1711 W Hall Avenue
Slidell, LA 70460
(504) 649 - 6248
http://www.sec.state.la.us/cgibin?rqstyp=crpdtl
34331685D
Name: FOXC, INC.
Type Entity: Business Corporation
Status: Active
Domicile Address: 1711 WEST HALL AVENUE, SLIDELL, LA 70460
Incorporated: 05/19/1989 | Effective: 05/17/1989
Registered Agent (Appointed 5/19/1989): FLORENCE F. FOX, 1711 WEST
HALL AVENUE, SLIDELL, LA 70460
Officer(s)/Director(s): FLORENCE F. FOX | CAROLYN J. FREDERICK |
BRUCE
D. CONNELLY
Incorporator(s): FLORENCE F. FOX
Wow, hard to believe anyone could be so ignorant of the costs of spam.
I own a small hosting outfit. The number one complaint of my customers is spam. I spend at least a couple hours a week dealing with it, either in adjusting/upgrading filters, teaching customers how to use it, or in cleaning out mail queues stuffed with it.
In labor costs alone, this is a big deal for me. It's lost income, since that's time I *could* have spent developing software for my customers. All this, and I'm just a *tiny* outfit.
Frankly, killing spammers is too good for them. I'm thinking more along the lines of tying them out in the sun until they're sunburned, then dropping them into tanks of fresh, pulped jalepeno peppers.
I just don't understand the spin.
Let me explain -
The media is based in New York. New Yorkers hate southerners. Anytime one gets in the news for any reason, they want to make them out to be as hateful as possible. Hence, out of all the spammers in the country, the found one in Louisiana, who is a religious nut (wearing a WWJD shirt, nonetheless), and paint her as a hopeless hick living in a shitty southern town. As a result, this is the average northerner's view of the south. Just be glad they didn't portray her as a KKK member.
Well, I'll give you my own numbers.
73% of all the mail hitting my servers during the last week were either rejected via RBL, via access.db, or via SA. For the mail that was actually allowed to be delivered, 48% was tagged as SPAM -- meaning it met SA criteria for the thresholds I have set to be SPAM.
In the last month I've spent ~30hrs (not all at once) dealing with spam and spam-related tasks such as user Q&A, dealing with false-positives, dealing with false-negatives, RBL related, server maintenence and patching, etc. That's almost 4 working days.
Do I feel it's 'worth it'? YES. It's necessary at any rate. I'd rather cull out the crap or block it entirely, and my users are much happier, my backup jobs are quicker, and my servers are healthier for it. Do I enjoy it? NO! Are there other things I could do or that my employer would like done? YES!
I know you know this, and no it's not always a huge time-sink, but when it is it's a big one.
Nearly all the software advertised in spam is counterfeit, so you can forward spam that advertises software to the BSA. Selling illegal copies of software is something that law-enforcement takes more seriously than spam itself.
A few software companies actually ask you to forward them spam that advertises their products. See Symantec's Spamwatch site as an example.
So this is a fundamentally tough nut to crack.
Not much, not yet. Those at the intermediate stages (the ones who lose the most bandwidth) could very easily act. Even those who can't be abused (because they are secure against abuse already) could act: by looking like they are vulnerable to abuse and then reporting the attempts at abuse to the appropriate ISP.
I've stopped spam to millions of people without actually changing my SMTP software (I couldn't change it.) All I used were command files and system utilities. If people'd stop looking for the hard ways to stop spam and start looking for the easy ways:
(1) They'd find easy ways
(2) They'd be very effective
On my VMS system all I had to do (once it no longer was a real email server) was:
(1) $ STOP/QUEUE UCX_SMTP
(2) Every so often look to see what relay test messages I'd caught and then deliver one if I felt like it.
Receipt of a relay test message tells the spammer that the IP to which it was sent (through which it was sent) is an open relay. Well, mine is open if I chooose to let it be - and mostly I don't choose that. But you know that and I know that - Spammy didn't.
You can do much the same, using Jackpot:
http://jackpot.uk.net/
You have to decide ahead of time whether or not to deliver test messages and occasionally Jackpot mis-classifies but must of the time it's dead on.
Better yet (if you run Linux) try out the Bubblegum proxypot:
http://world.std.com/~pacman/proxypot.html
I have two accounts on Hotmail that usually get 30-50 spam messages a day.
Now, 3 messages in each, total, for the last two days.
Did MS finally start filtering this stuff out?
*Still* negative function...
See it here
Wouldn't that make it pretty easy getting a verified address?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Why, not bothersome at all, considering I had long ago seen this state of spam coming and now have lines of defense set up. As long as you consider it not bothersome to even have these lines of defense.
... it sends every piece of mail coming in to the trash. At first, I logged in every so often to clean it up, but once the load became 50/day of spam, I just set the reject rule and gave up on it. Now I log in about 1/month to keep it active.
... nothing. It's just my ISP's mail account. It is defended by the 3 lines. And a couple of spammers have still found the damned thing, even though I've never exposed it publicly or handed it out to untrusted people. So it is probably a victim of dictionary attack.
... you're wrong. And the default mail filters are so flawed as the be useless. It is up to the Open Source community to make filering mandatory and helpful in their world, to make the point of how little Microsoft, Netscape and the even most ISPs care. After all, the model of a trusted Internet (i.e. you accept data only from those you trust and who exhibit will to oppose spam and virii) is long dead, so we have to be very smart about our defenses.
The 1st line of defense is a false address (i.e. I don't use it how I say I use it). I use hotmail.com. The account is handed out to sites that demand to know my email address for various reg purposes. This hotmail account is on auto-reject
The 2nd line of defense is a mail.com account. I use it for more trusted exposures, like regs for certain websites. This still gets spam, but at a manageable level (about 1/day).
The 3rd line of defense is another mail.com account (using their techie.com domain). This is the most trusted of non-friend exposures. I hand it out to co-workers and other such professional contacts.
And the last line of defense is
So, if you think that I'm not being bothered
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]