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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,
If someone could get that, we could, at least temporarily, reduce this problem.
I've got a baseball bat and loads of free time.
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.
> I wonder how they got in if it's invitation only.
I imagine they received many invitations, and simply didn't opt-out by clicking on the handy links at the bottom.
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
The same way I keep getting added to all these "opt-in" spam lists.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Some of the "infiltrators" are actually people working at the ISPs hosting these private forums.
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?
I always picture spammers as bereft of libedo and credit, with drug abuse problems. Really, wouldn't that explain a lot?
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I wonder how they got in if it's invitation only.
Dress in dark camoflage.
Shoot grappling hook to rail around roof.
Get to rooftop, shoot guard on balcony with silenced .22
Remove camoflage.
Use suction cup on skylight, cut out pane of glass and discard.
Secure rope and drop into upper floor office.
Climb down rope.
Use chloroform-soaked rag on guard outside office door.'
Pull out CDR with "email addresses" written in Sharpie Marker on it.
Walk down to party, take glass of champagne from waiter.
Send signal to antispammers telling them you're in.
Duh, how else do you think they did it?
Trolling is a art,
But the most popular download these days isn't Kazaa, it is Adaware. http://download.com.com/3101-2001-0-1.html?tag=pop Spybot is No. 3 in the rankings.
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 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.
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