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Security Researcher and Alleged Spam Operator To Square Off In Court In Ugly Lawsuit (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: River City Media, the company accused of running a huge spam operation, has filed a lawsuit against the security researcher and the journalist who exposed their activities. In a ludicrous lawsuit complaint, the company claims the security researcher didn't just stumble upon its unprotected Rsync server, but "perpetrated a coordinated, months-long cyberattack," during which it skirted firewall rules to access its server, used a VPN to disguise his identity, deleted critical files, and published his findings to make a name for himself as an elite security researcher. The company claims the researcher accessed Dropbox and HipChat logs, and even its PayPal account, from where it used funds to purchase various domains. The only evidence the company has is that the person who purchased the domains used a ProtonMail email, just like the researcher, who also uses a ProtonMail email. Remind you, this is the same security researcher, Chris Vickery, who discovered a Reuters database of supposed terrorism suspects, national voter databases for various U.S. states and Mexico, and various other companies.
Then Chris Vickery not only will be able to defend himself, but may be able to countersue under New Jersey's anti-SLAPP laws (SLAPP = Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation - exactly what this suit seems to be). The penalties can be quite substantial, $280K in a recent case. Not only that, but there is another New Jersey law that allows a judge to dismiss a case with prejudice within 45 days of the SLAPP filing. This is all cogent, because RCM is a New Jersey corporation.
Furthermore, there is a shareholder group engaged in a proxy battle right now, saying that they see this as a desperate attempt to distract shareholders from corporate mismanagement. So this may not even get filed, depending on how the existing shareholders see this action>
This happened to a client, they received a truckload of documents. We paid an outsourcing company a couple grand to scan them into an OCR program and used text search to find the proverbial nails for their coffin. With the newest bad-ass document solutions from big printer manufacturers. This isn't really that much of an issue anymore. Just drop a thousand sheets into the loader and press the button. A few days with a few temps, and you have your digital versions.