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."

Comments

Now that you mention it ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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 ...

I have seen the enemy, and they are ... Us

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Hi, I once wrote a bulk mailer for a DotCom. I was young. I needed the money. They collected addresses the old fashioned way: free stuff. People would be more than happy to fill out a little questionaire for a discount drink, or (gasp) to get ONTO the mailing list.

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.