Microsoft Sues Spammers
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The software giant, Microsoft, has filed lawsuits against seven companies for violating the CAN-SPAM &quot;Brown Paper Wrapper&quot; rule.
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If you can&#39;t stop &#39;em, sue &#39;em. That&#39;s what Microsoft has announced they are doing to seven spammers who are accused of sending unrequested e-mails with visible pornography to hundreds of thousands of internet users.
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Microsoft Corp. has filed class action lawsuits against vendors of sexually explicit commercial e-mail, the Seattle Post-Intelligence said Friday.
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A group of California cities and  counties on Friday filed a class action lawsuit against  Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O, saying the world's largest software  maker overcharged them for software.
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Microsoft Corp.  on Tuesday  announced 20 lawsuits against resellers allegedly engaged in  the distribution of infringing software and software  components.
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Microsoft Corp.  filed seven lawsuits against senders of spam, or unsolicited e-mail, for transmitting messages without labeling them as sexually explicit content, the world's largest software maker said on Thursday.
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Microsoft announced today that is filing 7 lawsuits against spammers for failing to label sexually explicit messages. The lawsuits were filed in Washington State Superior Court, alleging that defendants violated
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Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news - research) is being sued by several California cities and counties, which accuse the company of charging inflated prices due to its alleged monopoly control of the PC operating system market.
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Microsoft Corp. filed seven lawsuits yesterday against purveyors of sexually explicit commercial e-mail, alleging that they violated federal restrictions on pornographic spam.
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(InfoWorld) - Hoping to tackle the growing problem of pump-and-dump stock scams Microsoft has quietly filed lawsuits against at least three alleged perpetrators who it says used its MSN Hotmail networks to promote stocks. Hotmail has "received large volumes of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages" promoting stocks for such companiesÂ as Distributed Power, TGC Ventures, China Biolife Enterprises, and Irwin Resources, according to court documents filed during April and May in King County Superior Court in Seattle. Microsoft charges the defendants with violating the federal CAN-SPAM act as well as Washington state consumer protection laws and is seeking unspecified damages, according to the filings. Pump-and-dump e-mail scams are a form of fraud where the criminals purchase stock in a company -- typically an inexpensive penny stock -- and then promote the equity in millions of unsolicited email messages. The technique is one of the more lucrative spamming practices and has been "the fastest growing area in spam" over the past few months, said Craig Schmugar, a threat research manager with McAfees' Avert Labs. Pump-and-dump spam has not only taken up resources and threatened the smooth functioning of Hotmail, but it "continues to result in significant costs to Microsoft," the court filings state. Microsoft executives were not immediately available to comment for this story. Because Microsoft does not know the name of the spammers behind the unsolicited e-mails, it has filed the lawsuits as "John Doe" cases, giving it the power to subpoena information in the case and ultimately name the parties responsible when they are uncovered. It's the latest move in the cat and mouse game between pump-and-dump spammers and the technology companies trying to stop them. Pump-and-dump scams are gaining more attention from criminals and companies like Microsoft for one simple reason: They work. Researchers at Purdue and Oxford Universities recently examined the dynamics of pump-and-dump and found that spammers could realize 5 percent returns in a single day. Because these scams are so lucrative, they've attracted some of the most technically competent spammers to develop new techniques, said Adam O'Donnell, a senior research scientist at Cloudmark. "The pump-and-dump schemes are basically driving spam research and development," he said. Primarily, this research has centered around the creation of templates that can be used by infected PCs to create spam messages and on a form of e-mail known as image spam, O'Donnell said. These image spam messages look just like any other e-mail but are in fact .jpg or .gif images. Image spam is also particularly well-suited to pump-and-dump because the fraudsters don't need victims to click on a link for scam to work. Over the past year, image spammers have developed a variety of techniques to confuse spam filters, said McAfee's Schmugar. They've added colorful backgrounds, wavy text, and filled their messages with nonsense text to try to evade optical character recognition technologies, he said. For example, a recent spam message promoting China Biolife Enterprises, one of the stocks named in Microsoft's suit, contained the following message: "Symbol CBFE Price $1.55 (UP 11.51%) Target $4 Market: Bullish. Strangler minott goodnight bennett rebel rousers." With the jump in pump-and-dump e-mail, O'Donnell said it's no surprise that Microsoft has brought the lawsuits. "Hotmail is heavily used and is viewed by the Web community as one of the most challenging spam environments right now," he said.
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A lawsuit filed yesterday by the state of Texas charges two men with running spam operations that used misleading subject lines in e-mail messages and made misrepresentations in the body of the e-mails.
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SEVERAL everal California cities and counties have sued Microsoft, accusing the company of illegally charging inflated prices for its products because of monopoly control of the PC operating system market.
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Microsoft Corp. Thursday filed lawsuits against 23 companies in California and Florida, alleging distribution of counterfeit software.
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Amazon.com and Microsoft have joined to push what they described as a &quot;wake-up call&quot; to spammers, filing lawsuits against defendants they say sent millions of pieces of spam and who attempted
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Redmond-based Microsoft Corp. filed three lawsuits against alleged spammers in US District Court in Seattle Oct. 27, claiming the defendants &quot;spoofed&quot; its Web site, as well as the Web domains of America Online, EarthLink Inc.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has filed two lawsuits over the past weeks looking to crack down on spam on its Windows Live Hotmail network. The "John Doe" lawsuits were filed against unknown alleged spammers who had been sending large quantities of spam advertising debt relief and adult Web sites to Hotmail accounts. Microsoft alleges that a company doing business under the name Consumer Solutions Network sent "misleading, deceptive, and unsolicited commercial e-mails advertising debt relief help to Windows Live Hotmail account holders." The spam contained subject lines such as "Michelle, accounts over the limit," or "Robert, Payment not received," the suit alleges. Consumer Solutions Network, which could not be reached for comment on this story, operates several Internet domains including myfinancialsolutions.org, consumersolution.org, and financialsolutionsonline.org, according to Microsoft. Microsoft has also sued unnamed defendants for sending spam that promoted pornographic Web sites through Hotmail. Microsoft claims that these spammers not only flooded Hotmail accounts with unwanted messages, but also used Hotmail itself to send large volumes of spam. "Many of defendants' illegal e-mail messages were sent using ... accounts obtained through false or fraudulent pretenses," Microsoft claims. Companies like Microsoft, AOL, and Earthlink have launched a large number of these lawsuits in recent years, said Venkat Balasubramani, the principal of Balasubramani Law, and author of the Spam Notes blog. "They serve a deterrent purpose, and they also can be a mechanism for investigation. You can issue subpoenas and dig around a little bit to find what's going on," he said. Microsoft has filed such lawsuits on an almost-monthly basis over the past year, he added. In April and May of this year it filedÂ similar lawsuits against several alleged stock scammers. These latest lawsuits were filed in King County Superior Court in Seattle. The Consumer Solutions Network lawsuit was filed on June 13. The suit relating to pornographic spam was filed on Tuesday of this week.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on  Tuesday it has filed two lawsuits against so-called  "cybersquatters" or "typosquatters" who use the company's  product names to profit illegally from online advertising.