US Web Firm Described As "Phantom Registrar" Haven

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller directs attention to ongoing investigations of more than 40 phantom registrars linked to The Directi Group, including PDR, one of the 10 worst offenders on the Net. According to KnujOn, an additional 19,000 domains advertised through spam have been hiding their ownership behind PrivacyProtect.org, which The Washington Post has outed as Directi-owned. Directi claims it suspends illicit domains, but KnujOn provides documentation suggesting that Directi reports the registrars suspended and then reinstates them at another IP address. 'There has been some outcry about all this from the ICANN At-Large Committee, but as of this writing there has been no response from ICANN's Tim Cole,' Heller writers. 'Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that LogicBoxes, a Directi-owned registrar, has sponsored ICANN meetings in L.A. and Delhi.' Directi has since issued an official response to the allegations."

Comments

The Reason This Will Never End

[imyy4u3]

Quite simply, even if they shut Directi down, another company will take over the job of hiding the spammers for one simple reason: money. The spammers can afford to pay a company to hide them because they are making bank. Amazingly, about 1% of all spam emails actually result in a sale! So if you send out 1,000,000 emails, you can expect 10,000 sales! If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.

Now on the other hand, why do we even bother to try to pass spamming laws? Talk about another waste of time and money. If we pass a law saying all spam email must contain the words "unsolicited email" in the subject line, everyone will set their servers to block such email and therefore the spammers will certainly not put that in the subject line. So now we have to spend even more money to try and track the spammers down, which in essence we can't do because they pay companies like Directi money to hide their domains, IPs, etc.

Bottom line, this is an endless loop, and if anyone has any REAL suggestions on how to get rid of spammers, or how to force companies to stop hiding them and their domains, I'd love to hear it.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[thermian]

If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.

And if people stopped eating burgers, no-one would be fat. Alas you cannot stop large numbers of people doing things just because you think they're being stupid, the world doesn't work like that.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Anonymous Coward]

Bottom line, this is an endless loop, and if anyone has any REAL suggestions on how to get rid of spammers, or how to force companies to stop hiding them and their domains, I'd love to hear it.

Well, if you can create anti-spam laws, why not create a law prohiting credit card companies to make payments on products / companies which have used spam to addvertise their products or services. Thus there would not be any money for
spamming.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[thbigr]

I like spam. If you are not going to eat yours can I have it?

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[thbigr]

I agree, you prohibition never works. Laws against speeding don't work.

Why murder has been illegal for thousands of years, and it still continues.

What are we going to do??

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's try the 2-for-1 solution; legalize the murder of spammers!

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Bottom line, this is an endless loop, and if anyone has any REAL suggestions on how to get rid of spammers, or how to force companies to stop hiding them and their domains, I'd love to hear it.

1. Make all advertisement, solicitation, marketing, etc , etc via email illegal. No exceptions.
2. Institute a mass anti-spam campaign across the media, educating people about what to expect and what to do.
3. Prosecute spammers.
4. Prosecute people who buy from spammers.

Personally, I think step 4 is the option that will have the most effect. The more people who are responding to spam that get jail the better.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Angostura]

Someone has modded you insightful, but just have a look at point 1:

Make all advertisement, solicitation, marketing, etc , etc via email illegal. No exceptions.

My 2 year old daughter is having a birthday party. Can I tell people about it and mention what particularly cheap gifts she might like?

Preposterous - Of course I can - you didn't mean that.

OK. How about her pre-school who is holding a Christmas fair, entry 50p. Can I mail the parents of the children? The local newspapers?

Of course - you didn't mean that.

What about if I forward a Red-cross chain main asking for donations following the destruction of Hurricane Hannah. Of course, that's OK.

The only way this might get rid of spammers, is by convincing them that there is more money to be made in the law - arguing about the definition of solicitation, marketing and advertisement.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[riggah]

why not create a law prohiting credit card companies to make payments on products / companies which have used spam to addvertise their products or services.

How exactly would that work? We're talking about something that crosses international borders; who enforces the law? How would the CC companies know when spam generated the income? When does it cross the line and, say, make income from junk snail-mail illegal to make or receive payment?

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[halcyon1234]

If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.

You're right. Spamming is easy and profitable. If you take away the easy, then it will deter some spammers, but will just encourage others to find an easier route. Spammers treat legislation like damage and route around it...

The consumers, on the other hand, are a finite resource. There's only so many of them (though it doesn't seem it). They buy stuff from spammers out of ignorance, greed, lack of fear of getting scammed/harmed, or by just being a chump.

But they wouldn't if there was enough compelling education out there to show that purchasing spammed products is harmful to your health. Think about any food recall in recent times, from e. coli tomatoes to Listeriosis contaminated deli-meats. The harm-to-humans is often very, very low-- a dozen or two at the most-- but the public reaction against the product is immediate and massive. DON'T EAT THAT MEAT! People will wrap themselves in unjustly paranoid levels of caution over what amounts to a statistically tiny chance of something happening to them.

So the trick to stopping spam is to get rid of the customers. And the trick to getting rid of the customers is to, well, get rid of them.

Legislation doesn't work because if you get rid of one spammer, ten more pop up. But it is possible to track down a spammer. Pick a few good-sized spammers. Hire a mercenary company to track them down, kill them (painfully or not, depending on your budget), and seize their customer list. Then mail out to every customer a free sample of V!@GREA. Except instead of the blue pill, you ship out blue-colored cyanide pills. Bam, hundreds to thousands of customers dead in an instant. Then you leak to the media that they were all customers of spam. Let the media hype it up in the way they do best, and within a day you'll have headlines everywhere that SPAMMERS ARE KILLING YOU AND YOUR FAMILY! Once the lowest common denominator gets wind that the magic blue pill from the internets will KILL THEM, they'll stop being customers.

No customers = no profit = no spam (or at least significantly reduced levels). You can then clean up the spam-stragglers with law enforcement and mercenary companies, as there won't be ten people waiting to pop up to replace them.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[russotto]

Well, if you can create anti-spam laws, why not create a law prohiting credit card companies to make payments on products / companies which have used spam to addvertise their products or services.

There are any number of problems with this (where's that standard form), but susceptibility to joe jobs is probably #1. The day after this law passed, the Microsoft dirty tricks division would spam for Apple, Coke and Pepsi would spam for each other, and a good number of Linux fans would spam for Microsoft.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[daemonburrito]

Spammers treat legislation like damage and route around it...

That's actually pretty interesting. When I use the "route" quote, I'm thinking of the internet as full of useful free expression and accurate data. But the miasma routes around damage, too.

The rest of your comment is pretty far off of the mark, but that sentence is something.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Macthorpe]

Absolutely impossible, of course, that a rival company could send spam advertising for one of their competitors and use the completely reasonable revenge tactics you just espoused to trick you into knocking them off the internet.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Belial6]

It's not that Americans don't get enough physical activity either. The biggest problem is that one solution is trying to be assigned to every metabolism. A big one I see is that people are recommended to eat a 90% sugar diet. As you say, some people don't get enough exercise, but that certainly isn't THE reason people are fat. Then there is the skewed definition of "over weight" and "obese" by the BMI. The numbers shown in the BMI can be down right dangerous.

There are some people who's weight is primarily controlled by exercise. My wife is like that. It doesn't matter what she eats; a few days at the gym and she starts dropping weight. Some people's weight is primarily controlled by diet. This is how I am. When I get exercise, I don't burn up fat. I only build muscle. From a real health aspect, that is still good, but from an external view, as well as what is defined by the BMI, I become fatter, and thus more and more over weight. Even worse for the 'one true way' of weight loss, I pack on fat if I eat sugar. This include whole grains, fruits and many vegetables. For me, the only thing that makes me lose weight is to eat a primarily carnivorous high fat diet. That's right. If I don't get enough fat in my diet, I start putting on weight. Of course, there are also people that need a low fat diet, and people that need exercise and a change in diet.

We will never seen the weight 'problem' disappear until we stop using a crappy 19th century mathematician's chart to determine proper health, and stop thinking that everyone's body functions in the exact same way. We don't prescribe the same medicine to everyone. Ingesting the same medication can save one mans life, while the same medicine can kill another. Why would we think that the same diet and exercise plan would work exactly the same on everybody?

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[billcopc]

You mean like how you can be flagged as a terrorist organization if you sold meat that went into a suicide bomber's sandwich ?

The legal and privacy ramifications of what you're suggesting are very good reasons NOT to follow that path. I hate spammers as much as the next guy, but I'm cynical enough to know that more legislation is not going to solve the problem.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[irtza]

I beg to differ and site conservation of energy as my reason. Something tells me that you have flaws in your notion of how a body is designed. The calories you take in are from component chemicals - carbohydrates generally provide 4 calories per gram, fat 9, protein 4, alcohol 7calories/gram. All bodily activities from your basal metabolic rate (energy burn for homeostasis at rest) to exercise require energy provided by these substances. If the total energy expenditure in sum exceeds intake YOU WILL LOSE WEIGHT. This is a fundamental principle. I don't know what you mean by its "possible to kill yourself by using your 'simple' equation", but starvation does cause death my friend. If your body "refuses" to release fat for energy use that would indeed make exercise difficult. There is usually a delay between your body releasing fat and its utilization, but it does happen. Anything else would be a fairly horrendous disease - see lysosomal storage diseases for more info. Moreover, failure to release basic fats would likely lead to very early death as it would be necessary in pretty much any fasting state.

take a quick look at the wiki page on cardiac muscle and look at the basal energy useage - its fat.

The distribution of the food between compartments of the body is irrelevant to this basic concept that occurs in everyone and all energy consuming systems. Compartment models are only relevant when assessing quantities within one compartment - say serum potassium levels. Intake and output are only part of the equation. most body potassium lies intracellularly and thus movement into and out of this compartment must be accounted for.

I suggest that before you claim someone is "absolutely wrong", you should know the subject matter a bit better.

It could end if we

[AP31R0N]

Make sending unsolicited mail slightly criminal. Say, one minute in prison per recipient. 1M spams would be 695 days in jail.

Spam and viruses cost people money that they could have spent elsewhere. When a company buys a spam filter and hires people to run it, that's money that could have been profit or could have been spent on something useful to the company. Maybe that budget could go to making the health insurance a bit cheaper. Or give the receptionists a raise. Put a foosball table in the break room. 1K$/year is 1K$/year too much to spend on something you never wanted. Spammers are making people/companies/agencies throw away time and money. The only way to not get spam is to not have an address.

Hell, make it the penalty the sum of the amount other peoples time they wasted, 1 second per recipient. Even that would get people to think twice.

Alas, the spam from outside the US and extradition friendly countries would not be unabated, but it would be something.

Maybe such a law would be wrong/unethical, but it would give us some kind of satisfaction. i don't know, i'm speaking mostly out of frustration here. When i was a sys admin dealing with spam was a frustrating waste of my time and the time of my users.

Any law grokkers on hand to tell us what laws and penalties are in place?

Related: Spamhaus statement re Atrivo/Intercage

[McDutchie]

On a related note, Spamhaus recently issued this statement about Atrivo/Intercage, US-based persistent criminal spammer hosts. In the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup, Steve Linford of Spamhaus indicated they made this statement because they are highly frustrated with law enforcement's inaction.

Send the tax collectors

[GaryOlson]

Al Capone was prosecuted and imprisoned because he failed to pay his taxes. Use the same tactic on spammers. Subpoena the customer list of these registrars under conspiracy to avoid taxation. Then audit the taxes of all the domain owners.

These types of registrars and domain owners will no longer have a viable business if the expense of avoiding the government is too high. This would also be a useful method of giving lawyers something to do and stop bothering us normal people (with NewYorkCountryLawyer as an exception of course).

Re:Send the tax collectors

[Inominate]

Subpoena the customer list of these registrars under conspiracy to avoid taxation. Then audit the taxes of all the domain owners.

This, along with the lists going into public records could kill off the penis pill spam completely, even if nobody got prosecuted.

Use the information against the spammers?

[Seriph]

I've been doing some digging into this over the last few months and noticed an awful lot of spamvertized sites seem to have their domains registered with such privacy protecting registrars.

I've been thinking about how to use the fact that a domain is registered with such a registrar as part of a spam scoring metric and whether anyone else has already done work on this? Just on the mail passing through my systems, I'm seeing a very strong correlation between a mail being spam and it referring to a domain registered with such a registrar, with the domain nameservers being on dynamic IP space, and with the DNS for the spam domain having a very low TTL value set.

It's also interesting to track back the nameservers for any domains referred to in the NS records of the spam domain. By doing so I can find fairly large networks of interrelated spam domains and spam websites, the addresses of many of which already appear on the likes of the Spamcop and Spamhaus SBL/XBL lists or appear there shortly afterwards.

The point is, is it practical to use this sort of information against spammers and is anyone already doing it?

Re:Use the information against the spammers?

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

I have actually built a similar system to that a year or so back, and ran it on our mail servers. Obviously, because it was just for testing, it only tagged spam and didn't block anything, and only for preselected accounts.

If I say so myself, it worked extraordinarily well. It took a lot of tweaking, but it's hit-rate was nearly perfect, if you of course ignore the spam from legitimate domains (which would subsequently usually be picked up and tagged by the SPF filter). False positives were virtually non-existent (one in many thousands), and after investigation all of those proved to be from people running their own mail servers at home without 'proper' domain names and records.

The project was put on hold because one of my other projects suddenly went through the roof in sales (yay!), though as things seem to be calming down on that front a bit (work-wise, not sale-wise), I'm still looking at options for continuing that work. The big problem here is of course that the anti-spam market is filled with products, lots of 'em free, and I don't easily see a way to break in there. I like doing it for the tech side, but the business side of such things is really not something I enjoy doing...

On a side-note, I wouldn't use low TTL's for detection...

Don't worry. CEO is advisor to CyberCrime Unit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, Bhavin Turakhia Founder, CEO & Chairman of Directi "...also serves as a technical advisor to the local CyberCrime Investigation Cell" it says on the Directi website.

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Sometimes you can't beat real life for a great laugh.

Hold on, it also says,"Directi operates various online web properties and web services. To report any form of abuse activity (spam, phishing, adware etc) with respect to any Directi service simply send an email to abuse [at] directi [dot] com"

Argh, ha ha, oh dear, oh dear, I think I'll never stop laughing...

Phantom Corporations

[Ngarrang]

In the Directi response, "# The report claims that âoe48 ICANN-accredited Registrars (affiliated with Directi) ⦠do not seem to exist and are phantom.â
This statement is factually incorrect, and was completely unverified by Knujon. Knujon did not even bother to contact ICANN in this regards to get the right facts. The truth of the matter is that all 48 companies which belong to Directi and its clients, are in existence and are duly incorporated and validly existing under law."

IANAL, but I don't think phantom corporations are illegal in the USA. There seems to be plenty of corporations that exist only as a name on a piece of paper. So, yes, given this, they are right in saying that they validly exist. That does not address the fact that the companies may in fact be phantoms and appear to be a rather inappropriate way of doing business.

goes to show

[hesaigo999ca]

goes to show EVEN ICANN can be bought

They killed a spammer/scammer for me

[phorm]

I was getting a lot of spam which had links redirecting to this scam site. It was one of those sites that does a fake virus scan and claims you're infected so they can sell you a bogus product (funny how it was scanning windows-related files on my Linux system, eh).

I sent the offending URL to privacyprotect and was surprised when they actually responded by pulling the spammer's protection, then forwarding the info to his ISP and having the domain itself pulled (the nameserver has been changed to "ns1.suspended-domain.com" and DNS no longer resolves).

Re:They killed a spammer/scammer for me

[dodobh]

I currently work at Directi [1]. Official abuse policy when I don't get involved is to suspend the domain.

Abuse policy when I get involved is to suspend the customer (that's a few hundred domains for this sort of crap, or a few months ago, a few thousand. Unhappily, I don't have enough political clout yet to suspend large customers).

[1] Dealing with abuse issues is not part of the job description. That's a volunteer activity.

Re:Privacy hinders law enforcement

[mi]

Did Bill Ayers ever try to kill anyone? I thought all he did was help blow up a statue?

WordNet defines "terrorism" as (emphasis mine::

The noun terrorism has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act -- (the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear)

Belonging to a terrorist organization makes one a terrorist too, even if one is not (unlike Ayers) directly involved in any actual terrorism — take Hassan Nasrallah, for example.

Although per the definition above, simply threatening violence to attain certain goals is terrorism, Ayers' organization were planning to blow up an Army NCO club next. Fortunately for most concerned, they blew themselves up instead — the organization changed strategy to try to avoid casualties after this incident... But were also armed robberies (with fatalities) — a revolution always needs cash... (Interestingly, Joseph Stalin's first job in the Communist Party was to "rob the robbers" — what do the owners of "Democracy Now!" have in store for us?).

Just take Ayers' own words, spoken not during an interrogation, and not decades ago, but to the media this year: "I don't regret setting bombs, I feel we didn't do enough."

Whether he actually killed anyone is not relevant to his being a terrorist — only to an additional charge of murder, which, according to his "memoir" he may also have committed, but nobody knows for sure: "''Is this, then, the truth?,'' he writes. ''Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.''"

But his organization's ideology, as summarized by him back then was: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

Back to my original point — although the scumbag's guilt is undeniable (and, indeed, not denied), he avoided any punishment, because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them...

So, yes, Ayers was a member of a terrorist and otherwise criminal organization, and a terrorist himself — committed to this day to terrorism...

Thank you!

[BronsCon]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!