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International Spam Ring Shut Down
smooth wombat writes "An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US is in the process of being shut down. Finances of members in the US are being frozen using the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 while the FBI is pursuing criminal charges. The group sent spam advertising male enhancement herbs and other items using a botnet estimated at 35,000 computers, and able to send 10 billion emails per day. The Federal Trade Commission monitored the group's finances and found that they had cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone."
"Of spammy ring"
In the shower we sing,
While suds we fling,
Cleanshaven chin bring...
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
just stop buying stuff advertised by spam already.
An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US is in the process of being shut down.
China: > 1 billion people.
India: > 1 billion people.
USA: > 300 million people.
Australia: > 21 million people.
New Zealand: > 4 million people.
But the most important thing, we got mentioned!
bash$
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) 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
(x) 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
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) 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:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) 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!
Hopefully this will turn out to be excellent news if they can indeed keep these folks shut down and away from continuing their spamming.
My concerns though are the 35,000 computers being used to spam. How long before they're found again. Or maybe they already are being all used by others. Is there any way of getting these machines repaired or otherwise reported to their ISPs? I figure if they have stats on how many machines, they have info on the machines themselves. Heck if they're setup to "receive updates" for software or holes or whatnot, maybe a nice white hat hacking to "update" the software so it self destructs the wide open hole and patches exploitable holes so they're safe?
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
Does anybody know how exactly this spam works?
Say I own a widget company...i want to sell my widgets!! I know of this thing called "internet" that a lot of people are using, and decide that I need to utilize it to sell my widgets.
Do I just google for "email marketing"? Do I contact an advertisement agency?
Is there ANY sort of legitimacy involved in spam trafficking?
Do these spammers operate like real live businesses? Can I demand statistics on penetration from them? Do they have offices with receptionists and accountants and shitty corporate art?
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
If you still have a small penis, simply get a notarized note from your doctor stating it is so, and you can get your money back!
My favorite recent scam (not TFA mentioned above), as reported in the press:
$200,000 fines are being aimed at three of the offenders here in New Zealand:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/8D970CCB86C6155ACC2574E200636699
The Mothership
In all seriousness, how do these people stay in business? Are they just charging and not delivering any product? If not, where are they getting the shit that they're selling?
And why can't some authority just make a purchase and then trace where the money's going to track them down? Is selling this pseudo-medical crap and prescription drugs even legal?
Please, please, please, please, please, please!
Running a botnet's gotta be a jail time worthy offense, right?
Investigators broke the case with a tip from the spam maps.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have they really accomplished much here? If we RTFA (I know, we don't do that here on slashdot), there is a lot of hype and not a lot of clear progress. It looks like about half of the article is information that spamhaus already likely has. And if the botnet was ordered shutdown by an IL court, I'm not sure what use that would likely be.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
In a few years when everyone upgrades to security hardened Windows Vista it will mark the end of spam rings and botnets.
Three Rings spamming the Elven-kings for Cialis to buy,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords to refinance their home of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men lacking in size,
One for the Dark Lord reading his pr0n
In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie.
One Ring to spam them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to fleece them all and in their greed bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie.
John
Yes, in the short term this might cut spam rates a little bit, but others will step in to fill the gap. The only way to stop spam is to educate people not to buy from it and the industry has been trying that for years.
Like all security problems meatware is the biggest fail point. People are just plain dumb a lot of the time, especially when they think they can get rich quick or get a bigger penis or set of breasts.
How can you make a Burma Shave joke on Slashdot, where most of the users were born at least a decade after the last sign came down?
Besides, the name of the country has changed since then:
Myanmar is the preferred usage, Burmese is acceptable, and to remind readers it was once called Burma when appropriate.
I will refrain from the obvious Times-bashing jokes.
See also: http://www.slate.com/id/2191002/
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
...How many machines were running Mac OS or Linux/Unix?
How many were running Windows?
To quote Adam Savage: "Well, THERE'S your problem!"
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!