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Spamhaus: MCI Makes $5M A Year In Spam Profits
An anonymous reader submits "According to a new Spamhaus report, MCI makes $5 million a year hosting spammers and illegal spamware. MCI/UUNET has long topped the Spamhaus spam supporting ISPs list, with nearly 200 active SBL entries. MCI even took on spammers such as iMedia, when they were terminated by Savvis in their half-hearted response to leaked pro-spam memos."
with a compiny that brig is % million that much? maybe 500 million but only 5?
And in any event, one person's `spamware' may very well be another person's tool of choice for sending out mail to a large (and yet legitimate) mailing list.
That 5 million may not be everything they make off of that too, there might be other income they are getting off of it that could be coming from other sources. I'm only guessing, but it wouldn't surprise me.
...it's just business. MCI has been in a lot of financial difficulties.
1. Host spammers
2. ?
3. Profit!
Oh, wait, I guess we don't need step 2.
If you run your own zombie- mailserver, you're competing with them on a lucrative business of theirs.
ISPs should impose an E-embargo against MCI because they support spammers. All mail and traffic from MCI should be blocked until MCI stops helping spammers.
I'm not defending MCI/UUNET, or even sure if this is the same MCI that this story is about, but an MCI's AUP:
Email Sending unsolicited mail messages, including, without limitation, commercial advertising and informational announcements, is explicitly prohibited. A user shall not use another site's mail server to relay mail without the express permission of the site.
Which is strange because in the article it mentions "MCI is the only American, and indeed only Western network, where this spam support activity is 'not against our policy,'".
Or does MCI just post that as it's AUP on it's site to cover it's back if it wants to close an account for spamming in the future, or to comply with possible regulations etc?
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Dear sir,
I am a former member of the MCI ISP, here in my home country on Nigeria. Recently we have aquired the rights to $5 million ($5,000,000) US, which is ours to dispose of by rights, but we urgently need a business partner in Europe to help realise this sum. For use of your services we are prepared to offer you %20 of net proceeds. Please do not discuss this with anyone, since confidentiallity is paramount...
Please reply with your name, contact address & phone number & bank details for further discussions..
Yours
AA Albalone..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
If as TFA reads "MCI is the only American, and indeed only Western network, where this spam support activity is 'not against our policy'," then Congress should rule their (in)activity explicitly against the law. Most ISPs already agree as a matter of their own policy. Yes, the spammers will go elsewhere, but the U.S. should first clean our own house. Writing this law (or lines in a law) seems like a no-brainer.
BG
MCI is a $27 billion company. (according to http://global.mci.com/about/investor_relations/fun damentals/).
Corporately, they don't care about $5M revenue streams. If it's not a homerun, billion dollar profit potential, it's not going to be developed.
I doubt MCI is actively pursuing SPAM as a business venture. Not unless they believe it's going to generate billions in the next five years. Otherwise, this is a non-story, about MCI making a few pennies because they aren't 100% vigilant.
ShoutingMan.com
IMHO, what is really needed is AMTP, an Advanced Mail Transfer Protocol. The core of the spam problem is that SMTP was not desinged to handle the problems people are seeing now, mainly being spam. There have been a series of tools to aid SMTP in stopping spam such as RBL's and SPF, however, at the core of the problem, you still have a mail protocol that didn't have security in mind when it was created.
You only live once, so you might as well have fun before you die.
If their customers don't get any spam because they have good filtering, then they have nothing to lose (as long as outgoing bandwidth is properly paid for) from hosting spam. As long as MCI can tell their customers that they're fighting spam, they'll keep their customers. At least, until some other ISPs block them out completely.
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS
Wired article as proof
To paraphrase an anecdote used as an example in Dickie's book :
Johnson and Johnson's Corporate credo lists J&J's responsibilities in this order 1) to the consumer 2) to the employees 3) to the community 4) to the shareholders (meaning to making money.)
When Tylenol (a J&J product) was tampered with in Chicago, resulting in the deaths of several people, the local police advised J&J that it was an isolated incident, and that a recall was not necessary.
J&J recalled anyway (a $350 million process) and consumers flocked back to Tylenol when it was reintroduced to the market with new tamper proof packaging. Since consumers had proof that J&J cared about them, J&J ended up making money.
The moral of the story is that caring about your consumers may be less profitable in the short run but that in the long run companies that put the consumer first do better. It's obvious to me that MCI does not put the consumer first. Point 4 on the J&J credo is point 1 in MCI's strategy. MCI just lost one customer.
Aren't we talking about the same MCI/Worldcomm that cooked their books 2 years ago? So bad accounting practices don't seem to be the only questionable business in which they participate.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Why is this news? Almost every bandwidth provider in the country will house spammers so long as they aren't breaking any laws. Internap, the largest bandwidth provider in the states, houses a good number of spammers even tho it's "against policy" to send unsolicited email. If the almighty dollar is involved don't expect companies to be "moral."
I stole this
As a former employee of UUNet, whom, in turn, got bought out by Worldcom, which was once and now is again called MCI...*breath*...I can say that my pop.net POP3 account I had when I employee there remained active for at least 4 years after I left in 2000. It only got deleted after I stopped checking it for over a month.
What does this mean? Well, speaking from experience, they don't have nearly as many people monitoring this stuff as they should. So, my guess is that this SPAM abuse is the result of neglect. However, as with most any telecom/IT company, Marketing and Sales drives the business, the techies are beholden to the machinations of the Marketroids and Salesbots. This could be their bright idea.
Ask Ford how safe the Pinto's gas tank is.
then why not go after them and the other companies who publicize their success stories of wokring with spam agencies.
just yesterday it was posted at cnn.com that companies around world lose ~$22 Billion a year in spam related lost-time and general IT issues directly affected by spam.
it seems to me if one company is posting loss and the other is posting gain, both due to increased spam, the two should get together and chat at some point.
You know you want to click it... .. REally.. what could be the harm?
Go ahead, click.
http://www.post-literate.com/gerpunx/archives/2005 /01/prepare_to_lose_your_mind.php
Yeah - they may inadvertently make $5M from spammers - but I bet the cost of spam to them is a LOT more than that. It follows that this is not an intentional part of their business model - but merely the residue of spammers that they've been unable to eliminate.
www.sjbaker.org
It has been long known that MCI is also a top telephone telemarketer, so I am not surprised they decided to "legalize" spamming under their own Terms of Service.
What do you expect? Worldcom/MCI was run by criminals. Their former CEO, Bernie Ebbers, is on trial right now in New York for fraud and conspiracy.
Does anyone know MCI's AS number? Because I am going to take it out of my BGP.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Is this over the quintillion dollars lost on the 200 million billion man hours that their employees waste deleting the stuff every morning?
Spamming is now illegal in the U.S. and they are a company that just got into major accounting trouble when they were WorldCom. The last thing that MCI needs is to have more clients abandon them and more government scrutiny because they support spammers.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The part of the AUP that you are quoting only prohibits the sending of spam. The article is talking about "spam support" which includes other things, such as web site hosting.
From the article:
"MCI Worldcom's official position on the issue is that MCI can't stop their spam gangs selling proxy hijacking spamware from MCI's network as that would be 'censoring' the distribution and sale of illegal proxy hijacking software.
MCI is the only American, and indeed only Western network, where this spam support activity is "not against our policy". Spamhaus maintains that MCI's 'protected speech' excuses for servicing known spam gangs and proxy spamware distribution sites are dishonest and non-sensical in the face of the Internet's spam epidemic."
account I had when I employee there
Before anyone else gets to it...
What are you a caveman??? Try proofreading, ya yutz!
At what point do we start "accidently" dropping MCI packets on various routers around the world?
Ah, well that makes more sense then. Thanks.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
These spam promoters don't show the spammers email address anymore.
And I was soo tempted to sign a few guest books with them so that they would get all sorts of nice cash offers from dead dictators, dead husbands, princes, poor orphans/refuges/etc with internet access, buried cash boxes being hold by corrupt officials, dyed money that needs a special remover to clean it, etc and all you have to do is send them money to get some back!. Why bother with spamming pyramid schemes when there are several Mariam Abachas waiting to give you 10% $100,000 left by their dead Nigerian husband "100% risk freely"... provided you pay them the fees necessary to do so.
Could someone tell me the rationale for the Slashdot crowd supporting the file sharing programs/networks because they can be used for legit purposes and the "owners" stay out of the mix so to speak, and then on the other hand, slaming MCI for basically doing the same thing in this case? Sounds hypocritical to me.
Just becasue a new protocol exists does not mean that the internet at lage must upgrade to it the same day.
For instance, the group I work in only communicates with other people in the company and a small handfull of other IT companies. If there was a better solution we could easilly set up aliases on it and migrate to it. Some universities would offer it to students, and some companies could offer webmail or commercial service using it.
It is not like most people don't already have 2 or 3 email aliases as it is. This is not IPv6 we are talking about here, it would work along side what we have easilly.
You show me a hardened, open replacement for SMTP that would scale to the way we use SMTP today and I will show you a market for it.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Then why hasn't the VA AG done anything? MCI's lawyers have already talked to the AG about this and he isn't going to do dick.
Does anyone on /. actually receive as much spam as Spamhaus reports? According to TFA, they're estimating that as much as 95% of all email will be spam by 2006; I don't know about you, but I don't run an ISP-side spam filter, and I average maybe 2 or 3 a week, out of several hundred emails per week (I belong to several email lists, so my average is fairly high.)
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
They've also had some of the highest fines when it comes to violating the do-not-call list.
Example
That said, as mentioned, this is likely due to the fact that they are enormous and don't have the time to eradicate $5M worth of spam business.
Spamhaus does not use the US Can Spam Act or FTC definition of Spam so this is report is astroturf...
I've found our mail server blocked by several smaller RBL's merely because our Class C is part of MCI's pool. Granted that most ISP's don't use these small personal RBL's, but it isn't a good sign when someone will block MCI's entire IP block because of the amount of spam originating within their network.
:-(
I wish they were still just uuNet.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I'm going to raise some serious hell inside the company about this come about 9am on Monday.
Those sleazebags make far more than a mere $5 million from spammers. Whenever each of their customers are getting spammed, they're only too happy to send them the bill for extra-bandwidth consumed (plenty of people have T-1 or above high-speed connections that are rated by used bandwidth).
I've worked for a major hosting provider, and I can
tell you, hosting spammers is a money-loosing proposition. Our company used to host some spammers, of the "following the letter (but not spirit) of the law", "We're not spammers! <wink-wink nudge-nudge>"
variety. Some of them were huge accounts, including our biggest customer.
None of them were worth it. The spammers themselves were a huge drain on our support dept, and many of our other customers were constantly complaining because of our IP blocks being blacklisted.
Finally, we bit the bullet, and showed all of the spamhouses the door (like I said, including our biggest customer). It was a good, and very profitable, move. Within two months, all of our IPs were off the blacklists, our support costs dropped, and our reputation went up, attracting more customers (and big ones, at that).
Moral of the story:
1) Hosting spammers is a bad idea, for business as well as moral, reasons.
2) (The big point) Blacklists work. Very. Well.
So what I want to know is when is MS going to get off their butt and make their desktops more secure and resistant to these _simple_ types of attacks? There really should be no reason for a simple email or web browser exploit to be able to take over a users _entire_ system and exploit it like this. Hell, at least Linux and Mac OS X run normal users as NON ADMIN USERS and prompt for a password for admin activity. Why can't MS do this? And No the runas command doesn't even come close to the ease of use of having a dialog just pop up and ask for a root password when needed. Heck, Linux is Open Source, MS can look at how the major Linux distros do it if MS is not certain about how to go about it.
A few simple changes on the part of MS and the majority (70%+) of spam can be stopped.
I know that a ton of MS Windows applications die if they are not run from a user with Admin rights. However, all MS needs to do is implement a system like Linux or Mac has done and make _every_ user a non-admin user by default instead of making _every_ user in the Administrator group out-of-the-box. Then you will be running an MS Windows desktop as a non-privileged user. Now if you run one of those MS Windows applications that need Administrator access, MS Windows just prompts you for the Admin password. How hard could that be? This small change will allow all those "we need admin" programs to still run, however, it should prevent most of these email/web browser types of attacks from taking over a users system without their knowledge. For example, with this new system, an MS user using an exploited IE goes to a site, the next thing the user knows is that a site prompts for the admin password, the user clicks cancel and no-harm done. It is much easier to teach Joe User to _never_ put in his admin password for any web site than it is to teach Joe User to go out and spen money on an Anti-Virus program and _true_ two-way firewall program (MS's firewall is only one-way) and install them both and keep them updated.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Yeah, because Worldcom would never break the law. Well, there was that one time when they perpetrated the largest case of accounting fraud in US histroy a couple years ago. But that's all behind us now. I'm sure George Bush's tort reform will arrive just in time. We must curb those nasty class action lawsuits you know, they're killing the American entrepreneurial spirit.
Now, let's whip up some irrational hatred for their network's spam policy and forget all that. Cue Emmanuel Goldstein bleating like a sheep in 3, 2, 1.... "We are at war with the spammers. We have always been at war with the spammers. ISP's are hiding behind common carrier status. The only way to defeat the spammers is to revoke the ISP's common carrier status! [Goldstein]: 'Common carrier status protects you. It prevents you from having your communications monitored around the clock by the government and ISPs. Without common caaaah [sheep bleating] baaah baaaaah!' Crimethinker! Oldthinker! Hold ISPs responsible for spam! All over America this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of cubicles and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to our President for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Spammers Executed-"
Let's all switch to an other provider.
If consumers start taking spam in consideration when they subscribe to an ISP, providers will soon figth it for real.
Sending huge amounts of spam/virii - very cheap to do. Stopping huge amounts of spam/virii - very expensive. Companies must make investors happy with profits or have their stock and bond ratings shot to hell. People sell off stock. Borrowing power dries up. No more company.
Can somebody please post email id's for all the MCI execs. At least we could have the pleasure of subscribing them to extremely useful and fulfilling penis enlargement newsletters. On a more serious note, I cant believe this is actually a company with luminaries like Vint Cerf ( in my book the father of the Internet) on its board. There's nothing more ironical than that.
Let them know it's pretty lame to be making money on spammers when spammers are costing other companies billions.
hostmaster@mci.com
1-800-465-7187
1-800-264-1000
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
I used to work for MCI are we talking about this mci?
Totally off-topic, I know, but English is full of exceptions to the rule, and since you seem so earnest on the subject, I have a few suggestions for inclusion in your guide to the apostrophe.
The following text is taken from Conventions & Choices -- A Brief Book of Style and Usage by Stephen Merriam Foley of Brown University and Joseph Wayne Gordon of Yale University (1986 D.C. Heath and Company), p. 140:
Getting rid of the spammers is easy. First, we shoot all the lawyers.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Apparently, from what I've gathered from laid-off MCI/Worldcom employees, this may be the work of a lone mid-level manager try to boost his bottom line and impress his local vice president.
MCI CEO and board members... Try moving your lip and ennunicating your voice clearly by following the Donald Trump and "The Apprentice"...
"You're fired!"
One difficulty with being a really big ISP is that you don't have simple centralized decisionmaking. You have a whole lot of sales people who get commissions for selling services to different geographical territories and market-segments, and your sales person who sells to the under-$100K/year market in Northern Louisiana is typically going to sell people T1s first and *then* discover that they're spammers rather than the other way around - at most he's going to have done a credit report on the customer to decide if they can pay their bills. Sure, there are contracts that say that customers aren't allowed to spam, but it takes a while to figure that out, especially if the customer does business as Billy-Bob's Bait Shop rather than Spammers-R-Us.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks