Spammer Bankrupted by Anti-Spammer Suits

www.sorehands.com writes "The well known spammer Scott ("Snotty Scotty") Richter has filed for bankruptcy protection. In a Denver Post article Richter claims to have less than $10 million in assets but more than $50 million in debts including the $49 million that Microsoft is seeking. Microsoft is not the only lawsuit that Richter is defending, as a law suit filed by anti-spammer Dan Balsam and being handled by anti-spam attorney Timothy Walton is still pending. Hopefully, Microsoft will have the automatic stay from the bankruptcy court dissolved so that they can stop Richter from spamming and gather more evidence."

Comments

Re:Is your email server validating these addresses

[MightyMartian]

Uh, who doesn't have a fucking idea of what he's talking about? Please elaborate on how being a private company has anything to do with constitutional obligations?

This is what I was referring to. If this isn't referring to the Constitution, then I'd love to hear why you think commercial mail services ought to deliver every bit of zombie-generated fraudulent advertising to the end-user:

This country had a long long tradition of anonymous speach (check out how Ben Franklin and other founding fathers got support for their ideas). Cracking down on spammers is just a politically correct way of cracking down on anonymous speach at large.

It doesn't put any strain on network admins. I have my own mailserver running on a public IP. When "ron.slashdot@[mydomain].com" got spam, I started using "ron.slashdot2@[mydomain].com" -- and I informed everyone I cared about who had used that address about my "real" address (firstname_lastname@mydomain.com). I have been a heavy email user since the 80s; and have many gigabytes of email archived - but never once had a major problem with emails that I didn't submit to a spammer.

Wow, you are really quite clueless. I'm guessing by your comment that you don't actually know anything at all about administrating large mail systems, and are just some goofy little hobbiest without a very small presence on the Internet.

We administer over a thousand email addresses for over a hundred domains. We are hit every day with a minimum of 900,000 distributed dictionary attacks, where common addresses like jsmith@ and magic@ are nailed from thousands of zombies all over the world. Now, 99% of these will get rejected out of hand because we don't actually have a jsmith@ or magic@, but each connection is a drag on the resources of the server, and if you get enough of them in a row, they can become a DoS attack.

Our mail server was being brought to its knees by these attacks. There were periods when it would cease to respond on port 25 for up to fifteen minutes at a time, not only blocking incoming mail, but preventing our customers from sending it out. They got all sorts of charming timeout messages, and we lost a few customers who went to other services (read: spam cost us $$$). What's more, because we are billed on the 95th percentile, these attacks were topping out our bandwidth limit and we were paying several hundred dollars a month for about three months (read: spam cost us big $$$).

I finally got smart, installed Linux and Postfix on one of our old boxes and made that server our MX record, and essentially hid the main mail server. Last month I put a second Postfix box online to handle the traffic. The Linux boxes filter out something like 97% of all the incoming mail attempts, almost all of which are either virus-infected or zombie-generated spam messages. As I said, each joe job or distributed dictioanary attack takes up an enormous amount of resources. Here's a sample of the addresses being puked at us for each domain:

homogeneization5@,brannigan@,ckwt111@,tacheometer9 11@,sunspot1111@, tzi-dar111@,boogey911@,fitzsimmon111@, skewering911@,ldiscs5@,tztl911@,lacemaker111@, tzub5@,tunr111@

This is just a sampling from the last 60 or 70 seconds of one of my Postfix boxes, and this is a pretty light load. Now, hopefully, you may at least have some vague understanding of the kind of crap that's being puked at mail servers.