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Microsoft Wins $3.95 Million from Spammer
LehiNephi writes "A Washington, D.C. judge fined Daniel Khoshnood, a major spammer, for pretending to be Microsoft in order to attract customers. Specifically, he registered windowsupdate.com (not to be confused with windowsupdate.microsoft.com), then sent out mass email encouraging users to download a toolbar from that website. Although the suit was not specifically about spamming, the mass emails (and subsequent complaints) were what caught Microsoft's attention. So far, Microsoft's campaign against spam has netted them $54 million from six judgments, one dismissal, four settlements, and two bankruptcies. The article doesn't mention whether the toolbar actually lived up to its claims of automatically applying security patches."
Spammers beware! :) Yeah, thats some pretty cray stuff, I dont see why windows wouldn't have registered windowsupdate.com.... I dunno :)
_____
Josh Powell - www.ki4bbo.org
It seems rather dumb of MS not to have registered windowsupdate.com in the first place.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
This is helping them more than most of their products. If they can earn $54million from spammers in this way then their offsetting a big part of all they have ever had to pay out in antitrust settlements.
Which is worse a big monopoly abusing corporation or a swarm of smaller more annoying spammers???
The net's biggest adult anime collection
Obviously it'll never happen, but it would be nice if all the proceeds of these victories against the scumbags were given to anti-spam projects and organisations to develop more robust hosting (to deflect spammer/virus author DDOS attacks) and improve the filtering software. It would also really annoy the spammers to see such projects getting massive cash injections ;-)
I recently added rbl support (spews and spanhaus), spamassassin and the mimedefang milter to our company incoming mailserver and it's REALLY making a difference! Since I have a corpus from hundreds of people too, the bayesian side is already extremely good. It still lets the odd scam through, but being a company I can't afford to block anything by accident.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Talk about conflicted. I'm not sure who to root for. Did the spammer use Linux?
Microsoft battling spammers is like a battle between vultures and hyenas, i.e. two carrion feeders fighting over our carcass.
...even if its for Microsoft. Personally, I would prefer that the money would go to, say, Spamhaus, for giving us the XBL and the SBL.
I am glad this was the final judgement. This website caused me some grief having to fix up my parent's computer and get them hooked up to a new email address. Anyone know if MS has said they will give the winnings to a charity?
Lets hope it will help them crush that open source menace. Power to the Microsoft!
With all due respect, I think I read this news two days ago.
So, what do you do when evil is fighting evil?
1. Write a popular mail client which automatically executes arbitrary code.
2. Sue the people who hijack PCs via the above mentioned mail client.
3. Profit!
The enemy of my enemy is my friend...
I feel confused.
bash$
While I have not RTFA here (hell, this *is* /.), I would also have tended to want to side with the Redmond lot on this one.
:-)
Registering a website with that name so he could send spam, he deserved all he got. What Microsoft do with the money is another matter.
This is an example of what I would consider fair use. Not sure that they have updated it in the last 10 years though
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
I highly doubt that microsoft would see much more than a few thousand dollars of that $54 million. It is just a number to possibly scare off any large companies who may try to do the same thing. They may now stop seeing that a ruling against them could bankrupt their company.
Now I hope for once, that M$ will get support on this from the /. crowd. Who does not have my belief?
Didn't one of the recent worms (maybe Nimda?) target windowsupdate.com for a DDoS attack?
so what do us slashdotters do now, MS beat a spammer, we hate both, but the hardest part is coming up with a discision on who to flame!!!?
As one of those who reported this to Microsoft, perhaps I should get some of the settlement? Don't suppose that's likely though...
rewarding Microsoft = bad!
why am I so split over this?
[set headbangmode = 1]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Microsoft's campaign against spam has netted them $54 million
Well, now we know why they're interested in going after spammers. To make some quick money - the reduction of spam that may result is just a small side benefit.
How did this spammer, or any other spammer, directly hurt Microsoft? IMHO, the only people these spammers hurt are the average consumers who have to put up with hundreds of junk mail messages in the inboxes every day. Microsoft shouldn't be the one making a fortune of lawsuits against spammers; the people who are directly effected by the spam should be.
Let me see, parents who care enough about their kids to devote significant amounts of their time and a lot of effort into educating their children. And this is something to laugh about?
The home schooled children I have met are without exception well educated and interesting people. It is more common than not to see them enter college at very young ages. I have yet to meet any who aren't much more advanced than the typical child of similar age in a public school system.
Why don't you troll somewhere else, and pick on an adult as well?
...a perfect occasion to flood & flame @ the /. ?
This means you!
These law suites are good for victim satisfaction, but will not stop spammers, and in both the large and small of things really have no effect at all on spam.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You know, Li-nux, like its name, is based on a lie. The lie is the idea that anything can be free. Our salvation came from Jesus sacrificing his life, and Linux comes from the perpetuation of programmer unemployment due to, and causing the production of, "free" software. Friends, if Linux is in your home, Jesus is not in your heart
While I think it's great that yet another "identity thief" (sort of) has been busted, this does little to stem the flow of spam. What we truly need are more cases that are strictly based on the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail. We've got some great and not so great legislation out there to protect us... why aren't we using it? Because it costs too much?
And yes, I know that there have been a few landmark cases recently, but a few big falls aren't going to convince spammers as a whole to stop spamming. An concerted effort to shut them down via thousands of small lawsuits from you and I would be much more likely to have an effect, in my humble opinion.
....that the linux community can do the same?
i am wondering if that means that M$ is actually getting those 3.5 million bucks from him, or more than 50m$ from all the spammers.
Did the guy keep a couple of millions in the attic, just in case? Or is he broke, struggling to pay his lawyers..?
Wow with all the "How should we feel?" questions, I'm suprised its microsoft with the Borg icon.
although it is not unique in being a news and commentary site, it is a very large site, with discussions being the primary resource here. That's the difference, you can go read news all over the net, but some people wish to have discussions about it. Given that thousands of news articles appear daily across the WWW, the editors can only fit so many into the pages and still have enough of a base to handle the discussions adequately. If all you want to do is read news, why bother coming here and posting a complaint? Shouldn't you be out reading more news someplace else?
In other news, SCO wins $699 from Satan, Lord of Lies.
Yep.
The 54 million should go to the people who downloaded and installed the bogus-ware, the spam victims. MS certainly doesn't need it, and they don't deserve it from being lamers and not registering an obvious domain for them in the first place..
So let's flame the court system and the judge.
"In normal times, evil should be fought by good, but in times like this, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil." ..Come on, I had to.
Microsoft... and LAWSUITS.. and... sweet Jesus. This is a good thing!?
I feel the same way I would if Osama Bin Laden gave me a preview copy of Half Life 2 - conflicted and bewildered.
It's unclear what you mean, but have you seen:
http://www.proxypot.org/ ?
They don't sue the people (yet), but they do try to get ISPs and LEAs interested in the evidence collected. Often the ISP approac succeeds. It is also useful to create a list of ISPs who will not act on abuse reports.
As a bonus, none of the spam that the spammers try to send through them reaches any victim.
For this approach "popular mail client" is meaningless. Spammers don't start with a list of mail servers, they start with the IP address space and go looking for abuable servers (for proxypots the abusable entities are open proxies.) What is run doesn't have to be a real MTA (or real proxy server), just look enough like one that the spammers accept it as one. For the cleverer spammers it is useful for it to look exactly like some historic abusable MTA, like many of the earlier versions of Sendmail. Whether you need to gear your attack to defeating the cleverer spammer isn't known, but it's probable that you can have a huge effect just by going after the dumbest spammers (that's a big group.)
It shocks me that (1) so many people don't know how spammers operate and (2) so many of those who do know (that is, recognize that spammers have to look for systems to abuse) never seem to be able to grasp the importance of that knowledge. It's like knowing a burglar favors basement windows but doing nothing to set a trap for a basement window burglar - just bitch about all the people with insecure basement windows. Stake out a few basement windows and some evening soon you may be face-to-face with he burglar. Stake out a few IP addresses and some time soon you may gather information that leads directly to the spammer's IP address. Poof! There went the supposed anonymity.
I figured you didn't have a site, nor anything even remotely cool to share, just an anonymous large nasty ego.
seeya, you can have the last word.
"Microsoft Wins $3.95 from Spammer" Darn those cheap spammers!
Ah, you found me!
My room mate put a fresh windows install on the Net and had the RPC service exploited within minutes, with a dialog directing her to that site to pay for an "update" which would "fix the problem." It also installed a variant of some worm or other with some nasty back doors, which subsequent virus scanning and firewalling took care of. Nice to see Microsoft nail this asshole's hide to the wall, even if it's just a tiny grain of sand in the beach.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I believe in creation.e
I guess that it's not dead after all...
testing out my trending skills
*mumble*Idiotic food bigots*mumble*
The article doesn't mention whether the toolbar actually lived up to its claims of automatically applying security patches.
No but from this article on The Register:
"In reality, the toolbar loaded a utility called called BrowserAid/QuickLaunch which bombarded users with random, unrequested pop-up ads."
Ya know, as much as the /. community dosen't like Microsoft empire for one reason or another, this is one victory we can all applaud.
Strange, isn't it?
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Spammers = bad yada yada yada
But what about this:
to pay Microsoft for violating the company's trademark and [i]profiting from the use of a domain named controlled by Microsoft[/i]
Eh? Controlled by Microsoft? How?
And this:
Windowsupdate.com, a domain name that Mr. Khoshnood had registered in violation of Microsoft's trademark rights.
Same old *Windows* = (tm) Bill story again. So I guess WindowsCleaners is next? (That domain is still available so I'm not spamming).
-
My other
... is that of thousands of Slashdotter heads simultaneously exploding.
I have noticed this with bank websites as well. When online banking first grew big, I got an email survey that asked for personal information and led me to a third party site. I asked the bank if the survey was legit and they said it was. More recently the bank started letting users log in from an unsecured home page. Passwords seem to be protected, but we now have introduced a system in which users are accustomed to submitted sensitive information on unsecured pages. This habit can only benefit the crooks. I mean the latest exploit, involving ads on bank pages, should have been identified early as a security risk. I guess the risk to customer was less than the greed of the banks.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/long term/cult/unification/wtimes.htm/
Just google for "moonies" for some even juicier information.
I recall Henry Kissinger's comment on the Iran/Iraq War: "It's a shame they can't both lose."
It doesn't bother me if MS wants to spend their time and money hunting spammers. I doubt their motivation lies solely with raking in millions from the defendants, especially since they probably will only collect a fraction of that money. In this case, it's probably less about spammers/scam artists in general as it is about protecting their intellectual property. Microsoft has their own selfish motivations for this whole "campaign", as we all would as executives forced to act in the best light of the company. I could personally care less what they are, though, as long as they're ousting the spammers. (And doing so through a legitimate means).
Linux Forum
I was thinking more along the lines of the scene where the T-Rex busts in and eats the raptors before they can kill all the humans...
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
I would think that, if this guy had truly developed a windows update toolbar for IE, he would have notified Microsoft in the first place, and either gotten their OK, or just given it to them for their own deployment. But, knowing how this world works...well, spyware, anybody?
This sig no verb.
Windows Update is owned by microsoft - in fact, it is one of the URL's that the blaster worm DOS'ed.
According to this register article that someone posted, the website that the spammer registered was windowsupdateNOW.com
I have blog like everyone else
"The article doesn't mention whether the toolbar actually lived up to its claims of automatically applying security patches."
If it really did, Microsoft would have a fit! Either that, or it'd automatically download and install the Linux distro of the writer's choice.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
WARNING - do NOT click on the link above if you are running Microsoft Internet Explorer with Active-X controls enabled.
In most states in the U.S., there are only very few types of cases where the courts allow the prevailing party to recover attorney's fees from the losing party... which is assuming that Microsoft would prevails in every case, and would never have to eat a whole lot of attorney's fees in a losing case. Also, MS would not be able to recover the costs it incurred sending executives to depositions, having its executives keep track of the case, etc. Moreover, it is not going to be able to recoup its customer support costs and loss of good will (yes, MS does in fact have some with the general public) from customers who forgot that the site they needed to go to was windowsupdate.MICROSOFT.com instead of just windowsupdate.com, and then got screwed. Those costs alone far execeed the amount of money it would take to reserve 10,000 domain names.
for SCO
The Big Yuan - tracking mainland China
pay his fine in certificates for more spam, like M$ seems to get away with ?
I work for a large company, many thousand of users and it was announced yesterday that MSIE was a LIABILTTYjust existing on the desktop and will be removed from ALL CORPORATE WORKSTATIONS. They have done some fairly extensive mod'ing to a Firefox build it looked like to me, and arranged an internal update system for redistributable packages from MS in the way of OS/OFFICE updates.
May be smoke and mirros in the end but all I can think of is ABOUT FARKING TIME.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Did they click on the blinking monkey?
My new
... cause Microsoft could use the money.
so truly they will pay nothing for the judgements that went against them?
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Espically when it notes two bankrupicies. If the spammer declaers bankruprucy, Microsoft likely sees very little to nothing.
MS isn't doing this to make money, I mean even if they had made $54 million, that's a drop in the bucket for their finances. They are doing it because spammers hurt their bussiness.
We know that people are very bad at researching claims, hence if they recieve an e-mail climing to be from MS, they likely believe it. When that link then spywares their computer, they blame MS for it. Also a number of the e-mail viruses and worms have not only infected computers, but then turned them into little spam boxes. Since MS gets the blame when people virus their system (even when it was their action that virused it) it hurts their bussiness.
MS really wouldn't care about spma over all, except that the tactics spammers use hurt their bussiness. Well, that means that even if they need to loose some money on lawsuits to cut down on spam, they'll do that. Same with with AOL/TWTelecom. It hurts their bussiness, so they are also suing spammers.
Maybe they should pay the fines in vouchers for spam. That's how microsoft likes things isn't it?
pandnotpian.org. The untruth will set you free!
Remember: Spammers are completely financially motivated. The reason they do what they do is because they can make easy money at it. Well, the biggest way to reduce the amount of SPAM is to make it less profitable. We cannot, unfortunately, stop idiots from bying from spammers. What we can do, however, is raise the cost of spamming through fines and lawsuits.
If spammers are getting sued and arrested left and right, and loosing all their ill gotten gains from it, makes it much less likely they'll go back in to spamming in the future, and less likely that others will go in to it.
This is different than drugs, because in the case of drugs, the dealers are providing something that people WANT to get. They want it to the point of paying an obscene amount for it, thus demand stays high. People DON'T want SPAM. Generally even those that buy form it don't want it, they are just gullible. So people will not seek out SPAM or pay obscene amounts for it.
Thus if SPAM is a risky bussiness where one faces lawsuits, fines, and jail time, it is less likely that people will do it. It won't eliminate it, of course, you never eliminate something by making it illegal, but it can and will reduce it. Combine that with better SPAM filtering technology, which means less e-mail will reach potential buyers and again reduce profitability, a real dent CAN be made.
The "we can't do anything so we might as well give up" attitude is stupid. Applied to all crime, you have anarchy. You can't PREVENT things by making htem a crime, that is impossible. You can REDUCE them, however, and that is worth doing. Just because murder happens I don't think you'll hear anyone saying we should make killing people legal since the law hasn't stopped it from happening.
Looks like they can recoup all of the money they've lost in lawsuits by suing spammers.
I worked for this guy for a few months. He is the most disreputable excuse for a human being I've ever had the misfortune to know. I was young and stupid and I worked on a verbal contract through a friend who worked for him directly, and an assumption of trust once I got past a few paychecks. My huge mistake. He kept asking me to give him time, and by the time I broke down and refused to work for him anymore until I got paid, he owed me 8.5 thousand dollars. I was broke at the time and couldn't afford the time or money to sue for what was mine, especially without a written contract. My mistake in trusting him singlehandedly ended my consulting career.
This guy uses obviously program-generated lists of emails to basically spam every possible email address in several popular domains - aol, hotmail, etc..
In case anyone wants to discuss his case,
His cell phone number is (or at least used to be) 818-516-3999.
His work phone number is (or at least used to be) 800-516-3999. I believe the phone was answered as "mainstream advertising".
His email was dk@global2000.com, but I doubt it's still the same.
I have a bigger grudge against DK than anyone. It is thrilling to hear of MS's victory in this case. it's nice to hear of them doing good for once!
Anyone else out there know him? I know from friends that I am far from the only person who he screwed over.
Unless you wnat it to be. Filter, forget. Spam IS HERE TO STAY. Fliter it, and forget. If you want to make it you "project" and get all bent about it, well, that's YOUR heart attack. Filter, forget.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
the domain Windowsupdate.com that the article claimed was the one used for spamming seems to belong to microsoft http://web.archive.org/web/*/Windowsupdate.com
m
http://samspade.org/t/lookat?a=Windowsupdate.co
Domain Name: WINDOWSUPDATE.COM
Created on..............: Tue Jul 22 1997
Expires on..............: Fri Jul 21 2006
Record last updated on..: Fri Mar 26 2004
Administrative Contact:
Microsoft Corporation
Carolyn Gudmundson
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
I mean how many times Microsoft has sent out emails where they asked you to download some kind of tool bar? How many times eBay sending you email & asking to re enter your user information? How many times banks sending you email where they ask you to reEnter your online banking or VISA card information... ? & even if you really think that the email/webPage is not fake, how hard is to type the (main)web address to browser manually, like most big businesses ask you to do or make a simple call... I just can't understand why people are so ignorant, and we do not talk about kids, I mean adults. Ahh... Would be wonderful if people should pas a simple test before they can access to internet, it shouldn't take longer then 15 minutes to learn main thing, what do NOT do. If only Microsoft would leave Outlook default settings to "HTML off" It (all this and some other small simple thing) would save billions every year. ... Some companies invests hundreds of thousands dollars to the internet security every year... how about actually teaching that this is how the email works & this is how the internet works. & if ya see somewhere "ClickOnThisCoolFile.exe" that first thing what you should not do is click on that.
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice!