Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Spammers Infiltrate Private Online Spam Clubs
Angry_Admin writes " Spammers are now trying to find out which antispammers have infiltrated their ranks and are sharing "sensitive" info with fellow antispammers. According to the story at The Register: 'Online spammer forums like the Pro Bulk Club the Bulk Club and bulkmails.org have been gatecrashed by activists from organisations like Spamhaus. Steve Linford of Spamhaus said spammers know this already but they don't know who amongst their number is working for the other side. In theory the members-only forums of these sites is accessible only by invitation and only to individuals who have a proven track record in spamming. Apart from playing with the paranoia of spammers, the undercover investigation cast light on the latest spammer techniques.' Hopefully the spammers aren't that bright and the antispammers stick around long enough to bring them down."
Someone forgot the first rule of Spam Club...
Trolling is a art,
Well 3 cheers to these fellows! I wonder how they got in if it's invitation only.
So there are forums out there for spammers by spammers? Do these forums get spammed also? I, personally, would love to leave a few choice words on those forums.
Very good post . . . sir.
Sweet informative mod.
If someone could get that, we could, at least temporarily, reduce this problem.
I've got a baseball bat and loads of free time.
Hold on, to join you must need an e-mail address. Surely that means that this is a wonderful harvesting opportunity (or even better, does it allow people to avoid being spammed if the spammers believe them to be on 'their' side).
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
I have to ask where does the money come from in spamming? I could understand back in the mortgage boom when brokers were paying lot's of hard cash for leads, but this and other stories make spamming seem like a pretty big business which is rather surprising. Ultimately the money has to come from somewhere (the spam lists can only be sold so many times).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Anti-spammers will never infiltrate ...slashdot FP's.
and unfortunately, neither will you!
*builds a facility strangely resembling a german concentration camp*
*puts up a sign that says "Spammers Only Club"*
*rubs hands devilishly*
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Who might be the ones that are infiltrating the spammer club?
Those bastards should stop chasing the poor and nice spammer guys!
They're bypassing the zillions of filters I have set up like they're bound and determined to enlarge my penis, and bypassing my filters at a rate of 30 messages/day these days. The Spammer is just as smart as the anti-spammer IMHO. Play your enemy as your equal people....
...in bed
Sorry if this sounds like a flame but, what good is it? I guess it's pretty cool but will this actually be helpful? Kudos to the l33t guys who got in, I guess.
But once I revealed that Blast was really my second name, for some reason they no longer wanted me in. :)
notice the ad at the bottom of the article?
A bunch of Tech Stuff
"Hopefully the spammers aren't that bright and the antispammers stick around long enough to bring them down."
Just because someone does something you don't like, since when did that make them more stupid (or less intelligent) than you?
Sounds like the same tired argument that anti-virus companies and virus writers use.
Some of the "infiltrators" are actually people working at the ISPs hosting these private forums.
impotent, maybe? after seeing so many v1agra ads, maybe they suffer from the same problem. maybe they happen to be obese too.
"Hopefully the spammers aren't that bright and the antispammers stick around long enough to bring them down." Yea right!! Do you imply everyone is so stupid to get spammed everyday and can't stop these "not so bright" spammers.
Let's see, what were the club names?
Pro Bulk Club
The Bulk Club
bulkmails.org
Egads, with such a raw display of creative thinking, we don't stand a chance. [grin]
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I'd surely like to know how these people figure out where to send invitations to spammers. I have a mailbox heaving with spam, just begging to be returned to sender...
This isn't one hundred percent on topic, but I wish someone could answer this question. Why would producers of legitimate software, e.g. Kazaa, Weatherbug, etc. bundle their stuff with known spamware, ad-serving crap, and general spyware bullshit? Don't they realize that before long users will figure out where it is coming from and then stop downloading and installing their software all together? What kind of fees do they usually command for allowing this type of bundling?
The spam controls learn by a neural network. I just upgraded and totally recommend the new Thunderbird!
sorry, I'll get back to work now....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Given the ethics of spammers, is it any wonder that one of their own might "betray" them?
It's a tired old argument but if no one clicked the links in spam and no one bought the products in spam, perhaps we wouldn't have spam. The people spamming aren't stupid, they know a sucker is born every minute and they hope those suckers click their links. If the clickers would grow a brain we might not have this problem.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Yeah! I was wondering when people would start to take more offensive countermeasures.
Dear Sir/Madam, I approach you with this offer due to the recent death of [county] Minister of Justice [name] because there is a secret bank deposit box, containing the sum of two (2) invitations to spam club. Half of these can be yours, generously. Email for details. P.S. the box also has six p3n!s enl.ar.ge.rs, five bottles of the blu* pi11 C:@l:s, and the absolute L0WEST *R*A*T*E*S for yr. m-ort-ga-ge & /\UTO W@rrn+iez.
From the article: Good stuff.
I wonder how the members resist spamming their own forums? All those juicy, ripe email addys just waiting to be harvested...mmmmm.
"People selling these fresh proxies are either the virus writers themselves or someone very close to them. I don't know how ties between spammers and virus writers was first forged but there is clearly a strong link there"
...and maybe this is the bit of information that will encourage aggressive prosecution of these spammers.
Hopefully the spammers aren't that bright
i'm sorry, but that implies that spammers are in some way and in some magnitude, bright. sir, i am sorry, but this is simply not true.
vodka, straight up, thank you!
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
For fairness it should be noted that the US had, and has, concentration camps. In WWII they were mainly filled with citizens of Japanese descent. And according to reports, during WWII they were relatively decent places, i.e., most detainees did live through the experience, and only lost almost all of their possessions. (Strangely, those of germanic descent weren't detained.) One doesn't know that the current camps are as benign. Perhaps it will prove so in the future...but that's not the way to bet. (I don't know the odds...but I have an idea of the stakes.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Now, just give me a shotgun, a case of ammo, and a list of related addresses. It's about time we sent unsolicited E-Mailers some unsolicited lead pellets.
-Vendal Thornheart
>>Hopefully the spammers aren't that bright
Most spammers arent terribly sophisticated. Let's face it though, a handful are extremely smart and capable, otherwise we'd have gotten rid of them a long time ago.
Since $ (or yen, marks, rubles, lira, etc) is all that any spammer wants in the first place, it logically follows that any of them can be bribed to spill all the secrets (like how to gatecrash, or instead to formally invite an antispammer, etc).
Snoop onto THEM as they snoop onto US!
BOOM! Sorry, I just had to say that!
Man I bet This guy is pissed he didn't get an invite into the secret spam club and the anti-spammers did.
He'll probably protest by not odering any more PhDs on-line.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I cant seem to get to that website "bulkmails.org"
....
I keep hitting my refresh button over and over and over and over and over again - but it doesn't come up
hmmmmmm....
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
You'll know you're in trouble when you find a penis enlarger or a bottle of Viagra pills on your pillow.
All Spamhaus would have to do was include a couple of false spammer names on its officials lists, use those false identities to complain on more generic forums about the ridiculousness of laws like CAN-SPAM, and wait for the invites to show up. Almost every group, no matter how exclusive, has members who are more gullible and willing to make the invite. (C'mon - the only reason spamming is profitable is because the broader group of computer users has so many gullible people who are willing to believe they can gain an inch, lose a pound, and refinance for a much lower rate.)
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
What the screenshots reveal are, to say the least, scary. It turns out that an employee named "Greg" (greg@leadclick.com), who works as an e-mail harvesting database manager, also manages databases for SpamCop!
I kid you not. A spammer who works for SpamCop. I can't post links to the freesite (that's kinda pointless), but at least the incriminating screenshots are safe on Freenet.
It's only a matter of time before some pissed off person mails a spammer a bomb instead of a check. In fact I'm surprised we haven't had something like this happen already. /me crosses fingers, chanting "bomb em, bomb em, bomb em..."
I wonder if they have a 'No Spam' rule in the forum rules to try and keep down the mass amounts of spam posts. But then the forums would be stifling it's own members.
What a dilemma!
The Flynn Effect is the reason why IQ tests are routinely recalibrated. Basically, information and ways of thinking that start out the purview of an elite few eventually become the norm for the average individual in a sort of intellectual trickle-down.
I found this quote on one of the websites (http://www.emaillistclub.com/)
We will arm you with the knowledge to make killer sales copy so you can convert a lot of those who open your sales letter into sales today!
Oh, yEaH, sPaMmers write the best ad copy of anybody !!!!!!!!!!
Just 5 minutes, a monkey, a pound of salt, three feet of cat-5, 1 match, a can of orange paint (oil base), a magnet, a ream of copy paper, 1 square meter of bubble wrap, a laser pointer, one spammer, and a small room. That's all I ask.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
I was at a party the other night and got into a conversation with a guy who wanted some advice from me, as a Web developer, on setting up a commercial Web site. At first the conversation was pretty normal -- we talked about the choice of servers, languages, back-end databases, etc. Then he asked me, "How can I make sure people go to my site?"
...
So I talked about Google PageRank, targeted vs. untargeted advertising, making his site attractive enough to inspire users to stay on it, making sure it's simple enough that it loads quickly and works on different browsers, etc. And he seemed to be listening, but after a while he asked me, "No, I mean when I send people e-mail advertising my site, how do I make sure they go to it?"
I had to talk to him for a while to make sure he was saying what I thought he was saying, but after a while it became pretty clear that the deal is this: he's going to be running a site selling Brazilian sex tours, and he wants to know how to send spam that will a) get people to go to his site, and b) get through spam filters.
Needless to say, the conversation didn't last long after that, but it did provide some insight into the mind of the spammer. He really didn't see anything wrong with spamming, or even with trying to be deceptive to get past spam filters. As far as he's concerned, he's selling a service people will want if only he can get his message through. I'd say he was an aggressively normal guy -- a bit of a yuppie, with a backwards baseball cap and a lite (sic) beer, definitely not a geek, probably watches lots of football and drives an SUV.
These are the people who are crapflooding your mailbox. They're not mysterious creeps living in caves. They're your neighbors. Be aware. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
...would be to have a way to break into these open relays and infected/zombie/otherwise compromised PC's and disable relaying... but whoever tried would certainly get busted...or the opposite effect would take palce - something like the virus that was written to get rid of a virus (was it to get rid of Blaster? Can't recall... too many brain cells gone...)...more harm done than good...
Of course, even if possible, it would probably be like trying to kill fire ants one at a time...
(tedious and VERY painful). Maybe if we could just find the queen spammer...
Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code...
Just a random thought:
Isn't this just a distributed denial of service attack on my inbox?
*DrugCheese rants*
I don't need a forum so I can talk to spammers, I just need the spammers home address so we can just stop spam once and for all.
Rob
Why does writing the truth ( america has & had concentration camps) mean that you hat america.
it is blind patriotisim that help the rise of the nazi party & the fact that jews treated germans like we treat black people.
OH by the way
Guantanimo bay anyone. or how about abu greab.
While browsing thru many interconnected links on the Register, I came up with one that described how Phatbot was being used for Botnets. The advert at the bottom of the Register page was for Microsoft's Partner Program. First line:
The new Microsoft Partner Programme is here. Bringing all the advantages of previous programmes into a single framework, we've made it easier than ever for Partners to engage with Microsoft.
Yes, they certainly have!
Actually, those of Germanic descent were detained. There was an organization called the German-American Bund which was pro-Nazi during this period of time, so, perhaps moreso than the Japanese, there was an arguable risk from the German-American population that they may have collaborated with the enemy given the chance. This doesn't justify it, but it's a decent explanation.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Germans are white, and some even immigrated before the nation was the United States (the Pennsylvania Dutch, where Dutch is really Deutsch).
Japanese are "yellow" or whatever. They immigrated only more recently, since around 1850 or whenever Japan's borders were opened to foreigners. (At WWII, that still would have been about three generations or so for those here the longest.)
According to one of my Japanese co-workers, those of Japanese or Asian descent are still discriminated against when it comes to security clearances and government jobs. (I wouldn't know, I'm a white male from a small town, I got my clearance fairly quickly once the paperwork was through.)
Today, it's just those of Arab descent we round up and imprison.
I'm sure you already knew that, though - it just really ought to be said. Racism is hardly dead in America - we've come a long way, but we aren't even near the finish line yet.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
To my credit I had written into the system a very simple and effective opt-out. Click, click, we were out of your life. Everyone on the list had taken the time to fill something out to get on the list. It wasn't really spam.
At least that's what I tell the voice in my head.
I also wrote the web statistic reporting engine, so I do know that pageviews to the website would skyrocket following a bulk mail. And no, most of the traffic wasn't for the "opt out" bin.
This was back in '98, when spam was a joke, not a fact of life. I recently turned down a job reverse engineering a web-database of a certain annoying industry to generate targetted mailing lists.
And that was from my brother.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
In my opinion, AMTP could solve some of our troubles. If you had to be authorized to use a mail server, and if your route had to be verified as correct, I bet it could cut down on spam by at LEAST 50% or more. It might not eliminate the problem entirely, but even 50% would be a huge improvement. It might also make other spam-fighting tools like blacklisting more effective, the discovery of spam origins easier, and therefore, make it easier to prosecute spammers.
Sure, it might be a small blow to annonymity, but I say, so be it. If we are going to make any headway on the spam problem, we MUST be able to hold people accountable for abuses of mail servers. Unfortunately, accountability cannot be achieved without some sacrifices in anonymity guarantees. I think that ANY real solution must ultimately be a tradeoff between anonymity and accountability, and the sooner we realize this, the sooner we can start making any real headway. PERIOD.
From the producers of star chamber ( or pentagram chamber or whatever that campy movie was called)
we now bring you spam chamber
!!!!SPAM CHAMBER!!!!!
where the iluminati of spam gather to find new and devios ways to defeat our basian filters subvert spamcop and convince us that we need 24 hour hard ons 12 inch penises and a lower mortgage rate.
in the secret chamber.
" weve just found out ther is a spy here working for the other side "
everyone looks ar each other
then the camera pans to a geeky looking guy with and isight atachment pointed at the confrence.
" Why would you think that, our security is too good for this"
" everyone nods there heads and agrees"
" whew that was close" as he wipes his head and starts relaying the meeting to spamcop.
"the fact that jews treated germans like we treat black people"
huh?
Yahoo search for bulk e-mail
Google search for bulk e-mail
clickety clickety on sponsored links
Many spammers make their money by selling advertising service to retailers by promising to deliver eyeballs which can be turned into sales, but don't handle delivery of the product. Sometimes they're getting paid a commission, so they make money if and only if they're successful at attracting suckers to the retailer's products or websites - whether that's pills or pr0n.
But for many other spammers, the sucker is the retailer who's expecting to get high-quality sales leads, rather than the spammees. Retailers who've learned from the experience usually don't provide repeat business, or at least not without changing the price structure to only pay for actual sales.
And many spammers make money from fraud. Besides the currently popular Nigerian 419 and the pump&dump stock scammers, there's the old-fashioned pyramid game in its many guises. That used to be more popular than it is today, but it still seems to work. One variation on this is selling spamware to wannabee spammers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Err...sorry, but did you ever look at the HTML code included in the spam you receive? In any e-mail client that loads images from HTML messages by default, some spammers are smart enough that the request for the image confirms your e-mail address without you (or the "suckers" that you complain about) lifting a finger.
Yes the US had concentration camps during WWII, but the German concentration camps where DEATH CAMPS. Can you really place these on an equal plane?
Once a couple of anti-spammers get into one of these clubs, can they go conspire to invite other anti-spammers, or "trusted" writers of "31337" spamware products which leak out useful information (e.g. it does send the spam but it also sends a message to Spamhaus with the IP address and to Vipul's Razor with the message signature?)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, you know, after "the germans bombed pearl harbor"......
Ads are broken.
The most interesting part is that the links between virus/worm developers and spammers is no longer just hypothetical/assumed. It is now known for a fact.
Which means that, if enough evidence is gathered, these spammers can be proesecuted under the various cyber-crime/anti-hacking laws - which can result in imprisonment. A far cry better than the anti-spam laws, which only result in fines.
Maybe a few years behind bars, only coming out to pick up trash along the interstates, will teach them the lesson that gigabytes of hate mail didn't.
Being against the war but for the soldiers is like being against rape, but for the rapist.
So, you think the best analogy for US military action is rape?
And you're claiming he hates America?!
read your history. back then if you were a German, during the depression you wouldn't get hired by a Jewish owned company, I'm not saying that Jewish people are bad. there very good at surviving hardships by taking care of each other and having a strong sense of community ( we could all learn a lesson from that) but if you've ever done business with an Israeli or a Jewish person ( I'm sure not all of them are like this, but Ive come across this almost every time ) Ive found that they will try to not pay or alter the price after the price is agreed upon and the work has been done this can be construed as a form of discrimination. thus the statement Jews treated the Germans like black people.
the term jewed me down did not come out of thin air and while generally being considered racist has a certain degree of truth.
( by the way i found out that i am 30% Jewish a couple of months ago so i don't think i can be considered an anti Semite. )
First, I think it was, they had the "Bulk mail" box.
Then they added an option to report messages that got through the filter, by opening the message, then a listbox, where one of the options was "this is spam."
Recently they changed it so that now you press a button labeled "spam" rather than open a listbox.
I'm fairly certain their next step will be to make the button bigger and in capital letters.
Let's see. Class III narcotics? Check. Stock market pump 'n dump? Check. Nigerian scams? Check. Hijacked machines? Check.
...
All of these are seriously illegal.
So where are the cops?
It'd be amusing (yes, I have a sick sense of humor) to find out that everybody in the chat room was a cop, just waiting for a real spammer to log in
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
from the front page of bulkmails.org:
"The best way to improve sells is good bulletproof hosting. Thanks Bulkmails "
Can't a spammer play his trade in peace anymore?
What is the world coming to?
I was thinking about this.
If a spammer is a repeated spammer, some of the reporting services like spamcop should report them to their registrar. The registrar should revoke their domain and point their domain to a page explaining why this page is unavailable.
If the registrar does not revoke their domain, the registrar should have their operation suspended by the master registrar.
If a registrar has a habit of being a registrar for spammers, they will be shut down.
This seems able to shut down spammers and if this process is fit into the business model of a registrar, may be able to make it more difficult for these assholes to do business.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Unfortunately, that specific mob of suckers that clicks on the spam messages isn't reading slashdot (we happen to be a completely different mob of suckers) and it's doubtful that they even know a "dot head". Therefore, telling us they should know better isn't going to do the least bit of good.
On the other hand, a different old argument would be appropriate for this group. Simply go to all those URL's (by retyping the top level url, clicking on them probably sends them a key to identify your email address), and submit lots and lots of fake orders. Heck, automate it if you can, with some kind of randomizer that picks odd names from a list so there's no easy way for the spammers to filter them out, and even better if you can impersonate a large network. Suddenly, to get one legit customer, you have to go through thousands of pieces of crap, and the business model no longer works.
Now, if someone could make a distribute app that accepts some kind of template (go to this url, put a name here, cc number there, etc) to automatically fill in and bang on a spam supported site, I'd be more than happy to run it.
Some enterprising prosecutor of FBI Agent could make a name for himself, putting together a conspiracy case against this vermin.
Although spam is supposedly a felony now, it's usually hard to catch enough of these guys to make it worthwhile. But conspiracy to send spam, now you're talking better-level evidence and a larger bag. Plus lean on a few of these assholes, catch some virus writers...mmm...tasty...
If the Feds were still in the criminal prosecution business, that is (sigh)...
GNU Info is documentation optimized for machine readability
Hopefully the spammers aren't that bright...
This is hopeless wishful thinking. Spammers are just as bright as anyone else. In addition, they generally seem to have a fair share of low cunning. Don't underestimate them.
In order to get in to these Spam Clubs, you have to prove you are a spammer.
Can you then send spam to thousands of people to get in?
Or even just a little?
Where do we draw the line..
For fairness it should be noted that the US had, and has, concentration camps.
Stricly speaking, the Japanese-Americans (some were actual citizens, some weren't) in WW2 were held in internment camps, not concentration camps. There's a world of difference between the two.
That's not to excuse the locking up of those immigrants during WW2, but they weren't (purposefully) worked to death or marched into ovens.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The spammers are using more than just PCs with viruses. Here is a simple trap. Have a web form that submits to a cgi script. Lets call the page "contact us" with a big comment box and also an email address input which will be our 'from' field in the contact email that gets sent. From a website owner this makes doing a 'reply to' easier (such as with customer service). Anyway, create a cgi script for the form that creates an email and sends the email. Remember, the 'from' data will be in the email header. Name the cgi script contact_us.cgi or contact_us.pl. Ok, now for that domain have a catch all email account so you know once they have discovered this because emails will bounce back. What they will do is add additional 'To' information in the form email 'From' box exploiting the cgi email script. Set it up ... give it a little time. They will find you - and they will automate submitting to your form then to send their spam. They will send out bursts of like 10,000 emails every couple weeks thinking not to raise red flags. How do I know this? I caught them doing it to one of my web customers. The traffic to the cgi script were coming from all over the world. They would send many email with each hit (using numerous to, bcc, and cc in the header). Not something I cared to get involved investigating past that. Easier just to modify the script and prevent it from continuing. Having javascript to validate the form doesn't prevent this since they call the cgi script directly.
Two wrongs do not make a right. Vigilante justice is no justice at all. The law must be fairly determined and objectively administered, or it means nothing.
The idea of annoying the spammers may bring some temporary joy to those who have been spammed, just as the idea of humiliating Arabs in Iraq prisons might bring some temporary joy to those who have been affected by Islamic terrorism. But in both cases, upon further analysis one should realize that these reactions are purely emotional and have no basis in rationality.
Counting on vigilantes to curb spam is like counting on Sisyphus to finish pushing the damned rock. These grains of sand will not absorb the ocean of spam, not today... and not in ten years. The only thing this method will be effective in, aside from creating a false feeling of temporary relief, is generating real-life enemies - enemies who you might already have observed have little to no scruples.
The History channel had a show on the history of fascism in the US. They mentioned and showed the US concentration camps for people of German descent. However, the detainees were not limited to Bund members... in fact, any neighbor with ill-intent could finger you and send you packing for delightful locations like the Texas desert. Italians and other "undesirables" were targeted as well.
Allegedly, one of the quandries at the end of the war was that many detainees were more pro-Nazi/fascist after internment than before. IIRC, boatloads were sent back to Europe, with many more detained even longer at wars end on Ellis island and the like while the immigration authorities decided what to do with them.
However, let's also keep in perspective that todays US detainment facilities in Gitmo, et. al. are very different from internment camps or even POW camps from the day. Arguably, they serve a very different purpose... nevertheless, I find them totally incompatible with the Constitution that we allegedly so revere.
The wheels of Justice are grinding slowly indeed. Perhaps it took just as long way back then... a book or a show on the subject has a way of compressing history, no?
...
but it would be pretty easy to write a little script that searched for "spam-friendly" and similar search terms on Overture, Google, etc, and clicked through those links.
Pretty soon, ISPs would have to stop advertising those services. They'd have to resort to mis$pelling s+earch Te(rms like in a SP.AM mess(age, thereby cutting down the effectiveness considerably.
Of course, anti-spam services would probably take a lot of collateral damage from an approach like this. Innocents getting caught and torn apart by the mob show the fundamental problem with the vigilante approach.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
The Register article points to another article which talks about how the arrest of the PhatBot worm creator may provide some information on the rental of hordes of compromised machine as networks of spam zombies. It lists a common price of $500 for 10,000 machines -- In other words, your box is worth $.05 to a spammer.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Maybe an account, some message board software, or a server was hacked. Even with just one account, invitations to other message boards would probably become several degrees easier.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Is there any possibility tht in fact nobody has infiltrated their little club, and in fact the while thing is a head game to trick them into suspecting each other ?
It's Uma Thurman!!! She's not very hot but she's FAMOUS and she READS SLASHDOT! Whoah!
Interesting. What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean it's easier to correlate inputs with the decision boundary established by Bayes due to its inherently more parametric nature compared to a fundamentally more convoluted neural net?
Also, the two aren't mutually exclusive. Bayes is just a method of finding a decision boundary based on conditional probabilitites - bayesian regularization is a commonly used technique for neural nets (hell, I'm running it on this machine now), and it effectively tries to find a bayes or bayes-like decision boundary for a neural network.
In theory the members-only forums of these sites is accessible only by invitation and only to individuals who have a proven track record in spamming.
So, there are two sorts of spammers outa there, spammers and anti-spammers.
There you are, staring at me again.
We are fighting a war using purely defensive tactics against a determined, unforgiving foe without morals or compunction. As a martial artist, the problem is obvious. Miyamoto Musashi, in the classic "The Book of Five Rings", points out the need for a strong offense. It doesn't matter how good your defense is, if you let your opponent take one shot after another at you, defeat is inevitable.
One of the fundamental tenants of civilization is the establishment of laws. We collectivly agree to forgo our moral right to retribution and vengence when wronged, in favor of a communally accepted justice. So we find ourselved restricted by law to maintaining a purely defensive stance, while waiting for the legal authorities to apprehend and prosecute those who assail us in violation of those laws.
The problem is, the legal authority can't, or won't act -- the CAN-SPAM act seems to clearly indicate their intentions. When local authorities fail to uphold their end of this fundamental social contract, vigilatism rises as those who have been victimized recind the contract, and take upon themselves the imperitive for their own defense.
The authorities have failed to act, and left us to the tender mercies of the spammers. Personally, I think it is past time to begin looking for ways to strike back, within the legal framework or without.
why not tap into the vast nets of compromised machines yourself, to distributedly spam the spammers' order forms with false orders? The spammers' own weapons turned against them... there's something fitting about that.
Unfortunately, that way lies madness, federal marshals, and another spiraling arms race -- and in any arms race worthy of the title, the only winners are the arms dealers.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
read it!
Quick ethics quiz: if I send out a thousand spams, each of which reaches ten million people and wastes ten seconds of their lives (between deleting and earning the money to pay the marginal cost of services to deal with my shit), I've wasted over three thousand man-years of other people's time. Given that the average human lifespan is on the order of 100 years, am I
(a) better than,
(b) worse than, or
(c) about the same as
someone who murders 30 people?
Please explain your answer in a detailed but concise fashion.
Worse yet, those bastards forgot the second rule of Spam Club, too!
Check your history, over 10,000 Germanic Citizens of this country were detained during WWII and some of them were not released for YEARS after the war was officially over. It wasn't just Japanese and Germans either, Italian Americans were detained as well though I don't know what their numbers were right off the top of my head.
"Strangely, those of germanic descent weren't detained."
Roughly 10-12,000 Germans in the United States were detained in camps throughout the war. Furthermore, about 3-4,000 Germans in Latin American countries were detained in US camps.
by skript kiddies when it's pointed out how luserish they actually are. It takes almost zero "skilz" to do the sort of shit they pride themselves in doing. And as much as the clueless media and Hollywood love to perpetuate the myth of the Genius Hacker(tm) anybody who isn't utterly clueless also realises that only morons with a Visual Basic Virus-by-Numbers toolkit is behind the malware.
Until Bayer and Pfizer and the like sue spammers for trademark infringement on Cialis and Viagra and such, I'm going to presume such spam is sent by Bayer and Pfizer or whomever, and boycott accordingly.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
You would think that, rather than wasting mod points on the parent, the moderators could post something funny like:
"You inthenthitive clod!"
How many of these attacks would the spammers be bright enough to notice? Would they be organized enough to deploy detection attacks?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why doesn't it surprise me that Tucows is one of the registrars of one of the bulkmail addresses in the registrar article, or one of the registrars for one of the name servers?
/.'ers using Tucows and complaining about spam are hypocrites.
Tucows shows up regularly in my whois searches when parsing the headers of spam I get.
Nor is it suprising that in the whois for the domains referenced, or the nameservers of the domains, that both hotmail email addresses and yahoo addresses are found in the contact info for the spammer domains.
Hey Microsoft, figured out a way to legitimize spam yet so you can make money on each one sent?
Any of you
OMG the spammers are complaining about the infiltration? They deserved it, cuz they Fing spam ppl, if they really want revenge, let them try infiltrating an anti spam club or something :)
When a spammer and an anti-spammer collide, they annihilate each other.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
Old phreaking scam. Get yourself a nice 900 number, charge like $10 a minute or some obscene amount like that. Post it on the internet (BBSs at the time) to give it some legitimacy, then beige box a buncha houses (homeade linemans handset into the exterior TNI) to your 900 number, kaching!
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I've always wondered: why don't spammers just run their messages through SpamAssassin or something before they send out the spam? Just keep tweaking it until it gets a satisfactorily low score, then blast it out to the net.
I know they're not that bright (Nigerian twits, especially), but this should be a no-brainer.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Which is too bad, of course - it'd be nice if part of the process of busting a spammer was to seize his domain name in the process (then *you* become the owner of GetFakeHerbalViagraFast.com, which is rather a dubious honor...). But there's still a way to do it, which is to ask for the spammer's domain name in court if you've got some other legal justification for hauling them in (e.g. in states that have anti-spam laws that let individuals bring anti-spam suits in small claims court.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"...anti's are becoming ever more powerful through their web of terror." So antispammers are terrorists now?
Almost no spam gets through a good, trained bayesian filter.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Well done! Pack up your stuff, we're going on a road trip. Anyone that wants to join me, start on the list in the closest location to you, and cut a swath to the center of the country. We'll meet in Kansas and down a few cold ones in celebration. The first round's on me.
-Vendal Thornheart
>In other words, your box is worth $.05
Didn't the "condescending Unix user" in the scruffy beard and suspenders say "Here's a nickel, kid. Buy yourself a better computer"?
Yeah, that'll really work after this is posted all over Slashdot! That's like the local news channel telling the story of a kidnapped woman who secretly dialed her cell phone, and while appearing to argue with the kidnappers about which street to take, had said, out loud, enough information to make the 911 operator dispatch the police to the scene. So now all the kidnappers know not to fall for that one. What a win for innocent people... :(
"Heck, I just slashdot them."
That gives me an idea!
We could ask for a new Slashdot or Fark feature that would let users submit URLs. When enough people submit a URL, it's placed in a, "please visit these pages just to eat bandwidth" section on the right side. Certain known-not-spam sites could be automatically ignored, and there could be a non-automatable process to submit URLs to remain unlisted (for peoples' homepages if someone is just being vindictive and such). If people visitting Slashdot would be willing to click on a couple of links (of course being mindful of "Not Safe For Work" links) each time they visit Slashdot, they could fairly easily and quickly use up all of the bandwidth of the virtual host's account level.
It could even be possible to load the pages in a zero-size, non-resizable frame that would draw bandwidth but not actually display anything. This of course would need to be done with care, so that people don't find spyware coming down to their computers, but it could be very effective as well.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"As a professional direct emailer, you know that it is becoming much more difficult to distribute commercial email due to new anti-spam and double opt-in legislation currently operating in both the USA, UK and eventually the world...." "We give you the resources to potentially email EVERY PERSON IN THE WORLD."
This site resides on "4usservers.net", which appears to be on a COVAD line in McLean, VA, "h-68-166-46-225.mclnva23.covad.net" [68.166.46.225], in case anybody cares. That's probably an 0wned proxy, since it's an old Sun Cobalt Linux system with a known vulnerability.
Would you take photos of people having sex with children for $20k for one day? They would employ some other photographer anyway... see where I'm going with this?
Point is, it's still wrong, lucrative or not.
collateral damage
sick of sigs... *sigh*
This war gonna last forever. Spammers are just "complementary addition" to those idiots who use advertised in such way services. Who will want to break e-mail anonimity? Fight spam fighting with those who make it profitable. It's they who are good hard-working ordinary people, it's they think about only themselves instead of all of us.
jamesbond@gw.alfabank.kiev.ua
filters with this neat little tool?
Spam in my inbox went down from 100 per day (after
mozilla-firefox filter) to 0 today. Dspam is really
a gift to the spam-hating community, give it a try!
Story on slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/03/13/
Home of Dspam:
http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/d
All we need is to find an individual who meets the following criteria for gauranteed access to all these clubs:
- female
- definitely non-christian in religious orientation
- ethnic background should be American Indian and African descent. 50/50 would be best
- divorced with children marital status preferred
Then all they have to do is ask, "Can I join?". And if they are refused, unleash the ACLU upon them in all their glory for clear discrimination violations. They don't stand a chance.I'm glad someone's got an in to these groups. Maybe they should invite all of us.
And that proves that spammers are collectively smart - how? It has been invented once, then copied to death by all others.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Add "handicapped" and "lesbian" and it would be so obvious that even a spammer could figure out that they have to let her in.
> Now, if someone could make a distribute app that accepts some kind of template (go to this url,
www.astrobastards.net/uc
I had to check out what Xanax was, finally. Xanax is a date-rape drug. Some spammers ARE scum. Selling to the great unwashed is bad enough, but treating everyone as date-rapists is EVIL.
Er, no. A "concentration" camp is just that -- a place to hold a large concentration of people. The term goes back at least to the camps used by the British to hold Afrikaners during the Boer War. Either "internment camp" or "concentration camp" is a correct description of the facilities used to imprison Japanese-Americans during WWII.
The distinction you are attempting to draw is between "concentration camp" and "extermination camp".
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
This video proves how "smart" spammers are...
Clever signature text goes here.
...only works when the conclusion is absurd. The conclusion about traffic jams adding up to many deaths is pretty much the same as the conclusion about spam, and to assume it to be absurd would be begging the question.
The key questions here are:
* If a large amount of harm is spread out among many people so that the harm to any individual is tiny, is the harmful act less harmful than if the harm were not spread? (I would say unequivocally "no".)
* Does consuming an amount of time equal to a human life equal murder? (I would say that this is an interesting and unresolved question, but I lean toward "yes".)
Weighing traffic jams against deaths is not just a joke; it's a realistic problem that civil engineers quite likely have to deal with often in the real world. If you can design a system that will save one life at the cost of thousands of man-years of time, is it worth it? Well, you assign some value to time and some value to life and see how it adds up.
There is a definite human cost to spamming. Spamming a million people is definitely worse than spamming one person. To understand how bad spamming is, you have to compute the harm done somehow; and if addition is not the right method, what is?
the compromised machines are civilian casualties, and the arms dealers are the suppliers of malware, spamware, anti-malware, and anti-spamware.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
But otherwise I am prepared to accept that conclusion. ;)
I waste my time on Slashdot; Slashdot does not waste my time for me. Spammers knowingly fill my mailbox with crap against my will, so I must either spend time filtering through the spam or just throw away all my mail.