Slashdot Mirror
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!!
>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.
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.
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.