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Tech Reporter Pursues Spammer
girish writes "Technology reporter extrordinaire, Mike Wendland, is at it again tracking down spammers. Wendland conducted the infamous interview with Alan Ralsky, the alleged mega-spammer, a few years ago. That article spawned a lively discussion on Slashdot and eventually resulted in hundreds of pieces of junk postal mail flooding Ralsky's million-dollar home. Now Wendland is using a new tool from a service called Project Honey Pot to track email address harvesters. He posted on his technology blog this morning about catching a company that is holding itself out as a legitimate bulk mailer, but appears in fact to be sending to harvested addresses and conducting on the side some other seemingly seedy businesses. Interesting stuff."
That's crazy talk. This place is spam free. And your website can be spam free too! I'll show you how for just $19.95!!
- crawford@goingware.com
A long time ago I decided I wanted to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to email me, so I have never spam-protected my email. It's all over a lot of different websites. It's all over Usenet too.On the other hand, I get a lot of spam. It's only just beginning to bother me. I have a friend, she gets maybe ten spams a day, and she gets so outraged that she reports them all to the abuse@ addresses and so on. Me, I get a few thousand spams a day. I read my email with elm because it's the only email client that can handle the huge mailboxes I get.
What's getting me down though are the viruses. At one point I was getting 400 MB a day of viruses. Now I've decided I'm going to set up a virus filter on my home linux box, and use fetchmail and spamassassin and clamav and what have you to filter it, and serve it with imap to my other computers.
My hosting service tried to filter all the viruses with clamav, but they got so many viruses that it was too much of a CPU load, so now they do only very simple virus filtering, to catch the most obvious viruses without much CPU consumption.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
A howto video on how to prent yourself so they will take you off their mailing list.
An relevant note here would be to mention Spamikaze system (intro here).
In a nutshell, it sets up spamtrap e-mail addresses, and any IP that sends mail to that address is automatically added to the blacklist, and further mails from it are rejected at SMTP level. A false positive can be easily removed from the blacklist manually (example, PSBL).
What do you mean? Since I started reading my webmail, I've put all my company's mail-security needs into these miraculous services called hotmail and or yahoo! Why, it was but ten years ago that my penis was two inches shorter! Not only that, but now all of my debt has been consolidated! I can just pass on the tab to my next of kin! I decided contact you, Because I believe you are a reputable person and I feel You can help me and my mother over this confidential matter.
>Seems to me that this kind of thing should be fairly straight forward. I mean, sending millions of e-mails can't exactly be done "quietly" can it?
Sure it can.
Creepy spammer approaches creepy trojan writer. Creepy trojan writer rents creepy spammer access to 10,000 compromised PC's on DSL and cable. Creepy spammer commands each compromised PC to send three emails per minute from 11PM to 7AM. Creepy spammer has now sent 1.44 million pieces of email without an obvious flood anywhere and without an obvious IP address to block.
the university where I work has some fairly effective spam-killing filters set up.
We frequently see the following interesting fun:
a) People emailing us from blacklisted domains asking what's up. We inform them to complain to their ISP or use a different one.
b) spammers wanting through our filters so they can spam the 20k folks on our network. These are the most fun. I got to watch as the senior network engineer composed a 4000 word message to totally demolish any sort of hope the spammer had, and actually locate the physical address of the spammer. We got an "oh, sorry" reply, and heard nothing since.
...is forfeiture laws.
any property used in the commission of a crime (in this case, relay rape, botnets, spamming, etc) is seized and auctioned off to the public.
it's even better than destroying their property -- its taking their property away from them altogether. their home, their car, their computer, everything.
They have a gateway page to keep prying eyes out. I've seen it quite a few times in recent spam. For example, the spammer can include links like:
spamsite.com/?code=A2LKJ34AOD012LNVLA9OO38
The codes can be generated in such a way that they are unique to each message sent (for example, they could be a hash of the TO address). Without a valid code, you get a page like that one you saw. Lets the spammers track who's visiting their sites, and block the prying eyes of anti-spam activists.
I bet there's a good chance that's what's happening here.
What I don't understand is, with all of the negative publicity that spam gets, why do people still buy stuff from spammers? Although everyone claims to hate spam, I recall reading an article on /. a while ago that said as many as 10% of people buy stuff from spam, this just seems ridiculous to me. If I were walking down the street and I saw what looked like a delapedated, possible condemned building, and as I walked by 50 guys with crudely made signs ran outside surrounded me screaming "buy our product" I sure as hell would do whatever I could to get out of the situation, spam is the digital equivilent of this, yet people still buy into it. I guess it's that too many people think GIGO means Garbage In Gosple Out. As long as there are people buying the products though, there will never be a technological solution to the problem of spam.
I guess stories like this could help by showing what creeps spammers are, but the only people who are going to read articles like this already know the evils of spam. Perhaps we need to get a bunch of donations and run a commerical during prime time reality tv equating spam to terrorism?
Anyway, sorry for the somewhat offtopic rant, just been rather upset with spam more than usual lately, an email address that i've had for almost 4 years that never got a single spam has finally been getting inundated with it because some fucktard had to go and put my address in a CC with 100 other people for some stupid chain letter, and then one of those machines got pwnd and now the address is out there (BCC PEOPLE, IF YOU HAVE TO SEND THOSE DAMNABLE CHAIN LETTERS TO SO MANY PEOPLE LEARN TO USE BCC FOR $diety SAKE).
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Spam this:
I figure anyone who spams SpamCop deserves what they get.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I get massively less spam than you - around 300 a day, though most of it gets stopped dead at the mail gateway by ordb.org and dsbl.org checks. I get about 100 or so spam actually delivered, and SA (set to be pretty forgiving) filters out all but 10 or so per day. I don't envy being in your position.
Viruses, however, are another story. I haven't seen one in six months - it's fantastic. A combination of some postfix rules and ClamAV on the internal (sendmail) mail server did the trick. If you run postfix at your mail gateway, you can get it to check incoming mail for suspicious filenames before it even accepts the mail:(note: the regexp and message are all on one line, though I should move to an extended regex and split it up).
*blam*. There goes 99% of your incoming virus mail. ClamAV gets the rest, so I just don't get viruses anymore. Best of all, you're not generating bounces for virues, you're rejecting them instantly - so unless they're using some dumb bastard to relay, there won't be any mess of bounces to falsified addreses to worry about.
What about the new waves of self-zipping viruses, you ask? Yeah, that's an issue. I cheat and quarantine all zip files. I rarely have to retrieve one, and it's well worth the saved fuss.
As for mail programs, I'm happily using Evolution with IMAP over a 512k/256k effective link to work's Cyrus IMAPd server (all this stuff is set up for work). It works great, and I'm able to use 20,000 message mailboxes without noticable stress. Sieve (the cyrus IMAPd filter language) filters everything into the right mailboxes server-side, so if I'm in a hurry I just read my (always small and managable) INBOX without worrying about my lists.* folders, the (server-side filtered) Junk folder, or anything else.
It's great.
I have been doing a little tracking down of a Spammer myself from my state.
...
A few months back, when the free iPod craze started - a company in my state started sending out emails from:
Product Test Panel
Consumer Research Corporation
Subscriberbase.com
Saying, "Product Testers Wanted". They would go from hot product to hot product. Sometimes, not even released products - like the Nintendo DS was advertised almost 2 months ago - claiming immediate shipment.
I found that they were in my state by reading the actual email and seeing a location in my state and then by confirming it with whois information.
I then sent off an email to the contact. I got an email from a guy named Brian Benehaley. In typical fashion, all of my accusations were denied.
Turns out, if you Google this guy's name - he has written a well respected piece [respected amongst bulk emailers] about how the Can Spam Act will bring a new renaissance in email marketing.
I have since written the Better Business Bureau about him, found the record for the company is now in the 1000's of complaints
I have contacted my state attorney general which is conducting thorough investigation
I contacted the host ISP - Exodus - they have over 12000 complaints lodged against Subscriberbase.com
I have written a piece that has gotten into Google searches - that receives a few emails and comments each week.
More info about Product Test Panel
It has been quite fun to research this guy and put various internet tools to my disposal.
This was a good story to see what techniques Mr. Wendland used.
Google, Whois, MY BLOG, The BBB online, My attorney general all helped me
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
This is how I keep spam from ruining my email while also catching spammers in the act:
I have a domain (examancer.com) and a cheap hosting company that allows unlimited email accounts. Every time I give out an email address I make up one that will remind me why I gave it out (like slashdot@examancer.com, nytimes@examancer.com, someotherservice@examancer.com, etc...). I don't actually have to set up each account because I have all undeliverable mail sent right to my main account. If I start receiving spam, I just look at which address its sent to and I know right away which company sold my address or which online forum my email was harvested from. If the spam gets too bad, I actually go and create a real mailbox for that address and route it to a black hole... viola, no more spam.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.