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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 $54 million from six judgments, one dismissal, four settlements, and two bankruptcies. The article doesn't mention whether the toolbar actually lived up to its claims of automatically applying security patches."
It seems rather dumb of MS not to have registered windowsupdate.com in the first place.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Obviously it'll never happen, but it would be nice if all the proceeds of these victories against the scumbags were given to anti-spam projects and organisations to develop more robust hosting (to deflect spammer/virus author DDOS attacks) and improve the filtering software. It would also really annoy the spammers to see such projects getting massive cash injections ;-)
I recently added rbl support (spews and spanhaus), spamassassin and the mimedefang milter to our company incoming mailserver and it's REALLY making a difference! Since I have a corpus from hundreds of people too, the bayesian side is already extremely good. It still lets the odd scam through, but being a company I can't afford to block anything by accident.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Talk about conflicted. I'm not sure who to root for. Did the spammer use Linux?
So, what do you do when evil is fighting evil?
1. Write a popular mail client which automatically executes arbitrary code.
2. Sue the people who hijack PCs via the above mentioned mail client.
3. Profit!
The enemy of my enemy is my friend...
I feel confused.
bash$
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.
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"
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
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.
In other news, SCO wins $699 from Satan, Lord of Lies.
Yep.
"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.
Well Microsoft does get to pay Hotmail's bandwith bills, email storage costs, and employ people to deal with abuse reports? Don't forget that they also get to deal with all the spam that is undeliverable, bounced, or dropped by user's filters etc. Per individual spam, Microsoft may well be paying less than a recipient, but there is definitely a very real price tag attached.
Unfortunately however, under CAN-SPAM, only ISPs and not end-users can use the legislation to go after spammers through the courts. As the owner and operator of Hotmail that would naturally include Microsoft. Of course, the statement that the actions has "netted them $54 million" means the courts have awarded them that much, they will actually see far less of it than that.
It would certainly be nice if Microsoft (and others in a similar position) would make at least a token contribution to the anti-spam groups out there. Spamhaus operates almost entirely on contibutions and sponsorships, Spamcop has a legal defence fund, Spam Assassin is now under the auspices of the Apache Foundation... the list goes on.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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."
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
Did they click on the blinking monkey?
My new