USA, UK, Australia Sign Anti-Spam Memorandum

securitas writes "Computerworld's Todd R. Weiss reports that the USA, Britain and Australia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for six agencies to share resources to fight spam. The MoU lets the government agencies 'share information and work together to detect, investigate and track spammers' as well as 'exchange evidence and coordinate enforcement efforts.' The agencies involved include the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), its counterparts in the UK and Australia, and several other consumer protection agencies. You can get a full list of participating government bodies from the FTC press release, 'Consumer Protection Cops Join Forces to Fight Illegal Spam'. You can also get the spam MoU full text in PDF format from the FTC. More at The Register, vnunet, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald and InfoWorld."

Comments

Cool

[MikeDX]

Who wants to be the first on their mailing list?

This is great news

[Anonymous Coward]

But did they have to email it to everyone?

Potential for misuse?

[bhmit1]

share information and work together to detect, investigate and track spammers

So is this just forming some back channels to track anyone, or are their limits to ensure that only spammers are tracked. And if there are limits, how do they define a spammer?

Absent from the list

[Chatmag]

China, Korea, and Brazil are absent from the list. It just figures the countries sending the most spam are not onboard.

Re:Absent from the list

[Ced_Ex]

Are you just guessing? Or pulling figures out of your ass? The US is sending like 56.7% of all SPAM.

Just as a note, China sends 6.2%, South Korea 5.8% and Brasil is even less.

Re:Absent from the list

[Chatmag]

I"m going by message headers that I recieve in emails, and that most URL's in spam point to servers in those countries. Fighting spam also means taking down the web sites that they point to.

Granted, a large number of professional spammers are in the USA. What I have not seen covered very much is the new law enacted July 1st here in Florida that makes sending spam a Class C Felony. Everyone complains about Florida being spammers paradise, and now that Florida is on the track to cleaning up spammers, no one notices.

Re:Absent from the list

[bhmit1]

Are you just guessing? Or pulling figures out of your ass? The US is sending like 56.7% of all SPAM.

To pull a figure out of my own ass, I'd guess that 56.7% of all insecure machines that can be hijacked and used to relay spam are located in the US. That doesn't mean that the person doing the hijacking is in the US, which is why you need agreements with China, Korea, Brasil, Russia, etc.

China, Russia

[nycsubway]

Now if they can just get China, Russia, and the other major spam producing countries to sign on, that would be useful. Also if they could actually track down spammers effectively and actually stop spam, then that would also be something.

Coincidence

[BenBenBen]

Throw in Canada and New Zealand, you're looking at the founders of UKUSA and Echelon.

Maybe Fort Meade is renting out CPU cycles to Mr Richter.

Re:What if the spams originate from, say Russia?

[Zorilla]

What are the kind of penalties these spammers are staring at, if any?

How about being forced to use their own advertised products?

Re:Hopefully...

[Chatmag]

I can see it now.

(Announcer) The Queen approaches the SAS Officer, and pins a medal on him, a small riband and medallion, depicting an envelope with an arrow through it.

Re:O Slashdot, How Tragic Your Sundering

[BenBenBen]

Oh, tinfoil hat wearers, but only because they are incapable of seeing logic, reason or even the facts in their opponent's arguments, and result to ad hominem attacks and non sequiters.

Or am I getting confused with Republicans?*


* 2 flamewars in one thread!

I just got back from holiday...

[danormsby]

I just got back from a week long holiday to find 226 e-mails of which 170 were spam. I used to get far less but now my out-of-office (as enforced by company policy) replies automatically to spam stating I'm away thus reenforcing the fact that my e-mail address is a real and active one therefore even more spam gets directed at it. :-(

Re:I just got back from holiday...

[carndearg]

The vast majority of spam I receive has random from and reply-to addresses. Thus an autoreply just bounces harmlessly off into the ether, or if it's really unlucky, into the catchall of whichever hapless geek owns the random address the spamers mailing software picked.

So dont worry too much about your company policy signing you up for more spam, if your spam is like mine all they are doing is generating more internet background noise.

In fact, count yourself lucky that you have such a high useful mail to spam ratio, I wish I had that little spam.

Re:What if the spams originate from, say Russia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really much of a punishment, that.

I've been using their products for years, I now have a 14" penis and I've taken so much viagra you could hammer nails with it.

I weigh 6 stone and resemble a walking skeleton (with a 14" long dick) because of all the weight loss supplements.

I'm rolling in money from the "Get rich!" ideas, but I'm spending most of it on paying off various cheap mortgages and loans.

On second thoughts, maybe they should use their own products....

One small step... But only a small step..

[eamacnaghten]

I welcome this statement of co-operation, but it is only a very small step in the right direction, and it will do little good and have hardly any effect.

Spammers will always find a way to spam so long as there is money in it. If that money is denied them they will stop. "CAN-SPAM" acts need to be changed to "CANT-SPAM" - and internationally at that - and spammers need to be hit where it counts - in their bank balance.

However - I do not see the above happening. All countries need to participate and co-operate, not just the ones involved in the press release, do you really see THAT happening? Also legislation NEEDS to be passed that the US have already shown they cannot - and most other countries will not dare to try - not good for the future there.

I suppose we will have to get used to the usefulness of Email becoming more and more diluted, of the endless race between anti-spam software and spammers getting round it and so on. I think we will still have the internet and inboxes getting clogged up with that rubbish for some time yet - if not from now on in.

Save trees instead of bandwidth!

[Lank]

Seriously, I hear anti-spam sentiments every day on here. I hate spam myself, but it's semi-tolerable and it only takes 1-2 minutes a day to sort it out from the real e-mail I get. But when I get ~5 piece of printed real mail, well, doesn't anyone seem to mind that? So over the course of a year, I would get approximately 1500 piece of physical junk mail, and that must kill a bunch of trees I would think. I would actually prefer spam to printed junk. I am a quasi-environmentalist, though...

Re:Save trees instead of bandwidth!

[WuphonsReach]

But when I get ~5 piece of printed real mail, well, doesn't anyone seem to mind that?

That's because we know that the sender paid the USPS to deliver that mail. Sure, they get bulk mail rates, but at least there are expenses involved. Spam has a much lower cost to the sender, and if the sender breaks the rules (hijacks other machines or uses an open-relay) the sender doesn't even have to pay for the bandwidth used to send the spam. I don't know of any USPS offices that would allow someone to drop off a million letters without being both a known customer and with proper postage affixed.

Secondly, I have yet to see printed bulk mail that has a "track back" feature to determine whether or not it was accepted, opened, acted upon.

Re:Save trees instead of bandwidth!

[leeward]

That assumes the trade-off is that the people responsible for most spam would be sending mail if they were unable to spam. That is simply completely false. If some magical perfect technological fix for spam were implemented tomorrow, your level of junk snail mail would not change at all.

Shared resources?

[stripyd]

Given the UK government has failed to allocate resources to tackle spam using existing legislation and information they already have as noted here, I won't get my hopes up that this is anything more than a publicity exercise for the "somthing must be done" department.