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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.

2 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Re: I can see it now by saloomy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:If there is truly no evidence... by Picodon · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is all cogent, because RCM is a New Jersey corporation.

    You are probably thinking of another company, RCM Technologies, located in Pennsauken (New Jersey). There are other unrelated companies with similar names, including a River City Media located in Portland (Oregon).

    The spam operation operated by Matt Ferris and Alvin Slocombe seems run from Washington state, along with other companies that they have registered there under names like “Acetech USA”, “Cyber World Internet Services” and others, according to SpamHaus.