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.
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.
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
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.
"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?
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???
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.
"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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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).
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 good because spammers, in the privacy of their own little club, exchange spamming tricks. if we know their evil plan, we may be able to tweak filters to block it before it arrives. the whole point of spam filters is prevention, and knowing who it's coming from and how they plan to send it might be very helpful.
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.
FYI Bayesian Filtering isn't quite the same as a Neural network, a notable difference being that with bayes a much greater portion of the behavior learned by the system is easily available for analysis.
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
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*
It's unwanted email, for heaven's sake. Calm down and stop talking nonsense about bombs.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
...
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.
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
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.
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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!