&#39;&#39;Dirty dozen&#39;&#39; spam list became the best easy-money business
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&quot;Many home users&#39; computers are sending out spam because they have had their broadband Internet connections exploited by remote hackers.
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If you&#39;re looking for a country to blame for all that spam in your e-mail box, you don&#39;t have to look very far. The United States is by far the world&#39;s largest spam producing nation according to a study by
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Sure, most of it reads like filthy gibberish. But the authors of this dreck are not semi-literate perverts. They&#39;re cool, rational business folk who have found a sleazy but effective way to make a buck.
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It wasn&#39;t long ago that competitive entities seemed to be joining together to combat Internet users&#39; common foe, spam. However, despite the fact that big Internet players
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One of the top 10 spammers in the US has been sentenced to nine years in prison for illegal spam activities under Virginia&#39;s anti-spam law.
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(InfoWorld) - "Ed," a retired spammer, built a considerable fortune sending e-mails that promoted pills, porn, and casinos. At the peak of his power, Ed says he pulled in $10,000 to $15,000 a week, storing the money in $20 bills in stacks of boxes. It was a life of greed and excess, one that preyed especially on vulnerable people hoping to score drugs or win money gambling on the Internet. From when he was expelled from high school at 17 until he quit his spam career at 22, Ed -- who does not reveal his full name but sometimes goes by SpammerX -- was part of an electronic underworld profiting from the Internet via spam. "Yes, I know I'm going to hell," said Ed, who spoke in London on Wednesday at an event hosted by IronPort Systems, a security vendor now owned by Cisco Systems. "I'm actually a really nice guy. Trust me." A quick-witted and affable guy who wears an earring and casual clothes, there was a time when Ed wasn't so nice. He sent spam to recovering gambling addicts enticing them to gambling Web sites. He used e-mail addresses of people known to have bought antianxiety medication or antidepressants and targeted them with pharmaceutical spam. In short, Ed said he was "basically what people hate about the Internet." He spent 10 hours a day, seven days a week studying how to send spam and avoid filtering technologies in security software designed to weed out garbage e-mail. Most spam filters are effective 99 percent of the time; he aimed for that remaining window, using tricks such as including slightly different images in his spam, which can fool filters into thinking the e-mail is legitimate. "The better I got at spam, the more money I made," Ed said. He would start a spam run by finding an online merchant who wanted to sell a product. Then he'd acquire a list of e-mail addresses -- another commodity that has spawned its own market in the world of spam. He'd also set up a domain name, included as a link in a spam message, that, if clicked, would redirect the recipient to the merchant's Web site, enabling Ed to get credit for the referral. The spam would then be sent from a network of hacker-controlled computers, called botnets. Those machines are often consumer PCs infected with malicious software that a hacker can control. Ed would "rent" time on those computers from another group of hackers that specialized in creating botnets. If one of the spam recipients bought something, Ed would get a percentage of the sale. For pharmaceuticals the commission was around 50 percent, he said. Response rates to spam tend to be a fraction of 1 percent. But Ed said he once got a 30 percent response rate for a campaign. The product? A niche type of adult entertainment: photos of fully clothed women popping balloons. To track the money, merchants set up a "referral sales page" where spammers can see how much they make from a spam run. Ed would log in frequently, watching the money increase. He was paid into electronic payment transfer accounts, such as e-gold or PayPal, or into his debit card account, which he could cash out in $20 bills. That became problematic when the cash became voluminous. He says he made $480,000 his last year of spamming. But the lifestyle of being a spammer was taking a toll. In essence, he had no life. It's hard to go into a bar and explain your job to a woman by saying "I advertise penis enlargement pills online," Ed said. "It doesn't go down very well." He rationalized his actions by saying spamming is not like robbing someone, although the lurid impact of spam was clear. Some nine million Americans have some dependence on prescription drugs, Ed said, and he noticed that the same people were buying different drugs each month. "These were addicts," he said. Additionally, "the product is always counterfeit to some degree. If you're lucky, sometimes it's a diluted version of the real thing," he said. Viagra is cut with amphetamines, and homemade pills are common from sketchy labs in countries such as China, India, and Fiji, Ed said. So Ed got out of the business. He's written a book, "Inside the Spam Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side," which he said has had some take-up inÂ law enforcement circlesÂ eager to learn more about the spam business, which he projects will only get worse. As broadband speeds increase, spammers will increasingly look to market goods by making VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls or sending out videos, Ed said. The ultimate unsolvable problem is users, who continue to buy products marketed by spam, making the industry possible. "I think in 10 years we'll still get spam," Ed said. "Be prepared to be bombarded." Â
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Pump and dump gang raked in millions Notorious spammer Alan Ralsky and ten others have been indicted in the US over the alleged use of junk mail to promote stock fraud scams.â¦
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Fast, intelligent, automatic spam detector using Paul Graham style Bayesian analysis of word counts in spam and non-spam emails. Filtering adapts to personal tastes automatically. No manual rule creation required. This release adds the final missing pieces to the new parser code.  MBX files and Content-Length headers are now supported.  Database cleanup when signals are caught has also been improved.  I would like to move 1.1 into the stable branch fairly soon so if folks would test out this release and report any problems it would be a big help!   The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61201&package_id=73566
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You've got less spam, according to America Online, the world's largest online service.
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You&#39;ve got less spam, according to America Online, the world&#39;s largest online service. The online unit of Time Warner Inc.
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Americaâs largest Internet Service Provider has good news for the web users. They say that AOL subscribers are getting fewer spam mails than in recent times.
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A man described as one of the nationâs most prolific senders of spam was among 11 people accused in a federal indictment of defrauding people by manipulating Chinese stock prices.
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(InfoWorld) - Spammers have found a way to mine free Web-hosting services for cash. Online scammers have long used free hosting services such as Yahoo Geocities or Tripod as a way to get around e-mail filters that might otherwise recognize their spammy Web sites. But now some enterprising spammers have begun selling each other these free Web pages, according to security vendor McAfee Inc. For US$25 per week a spammer will sell 50 Web-hosting accounts that can be used to redirect Web traffic to sites that normally would be flagged. "These 'link providers' create and maintain thousands of free hosting accounts on behalf of the spammers," wrote McAfee's Nick Kelly in a recent posting to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. That posting can be foundÂ here. "They know that the bigger hosts are unlikely to get blacklisted because they have so many legitimate users," he added. Scammers also use the free Web pages to try to manipulate search engines, by making it look as if their Web sites are widely linked, said Adam O'Donnell, senior research scientist with Cloudmark Inc., an e-mail filtering company. And while the free hosting providers are taking steps to shut down this abuse, they appear to be fighting a losing battle. In late June, Cloudmark researchers were seeing about 1,500 phony URLs (uniform resource locators) on any given day on one of the most abused free hosting services (O'Donnell declined to name names). One month later, that number had jumped to 3,500. Spammers are simply able to out-pace the hosters' security teams, O'Donnell said. "They will gain more hosts for their pages than the company is able to take down," he said. The free hosters have been placed in a tough position because they do not want to shut down legitimate users, but they also do not have the technical resources to mine spam for Web pages that are being misused, O'Donnell said. Lately, however, the hosters have been partnering with security vendors to address the problem. Cloudmark is working with some hosting providers, hoping to sell them "reputation" information that tells them how many times their member URLs are being seen in spam. McAfee has been providing similar information to an undisclosed service provider, Kelly wrote. "This relationship has cut the abuse observed by us on that provider by over 90 percent in less than a week." He added, "let's hope those spammers are buying their new watches from pound$hop rather than Bolex this summer."
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A study finds that only one out of every 20 e-mails is from a legitimate source, and business professionals now rate it the top form of junk advertising.
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The spam-blocking feature of Trend Micro&#39;s package may be more immediately useful, because bandwidth is money. Software that can prevent unwanted messages from coming through will save users cash.
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The CertifiedEmail service targets businesses and other legit mass mailers. On board are Comcast, Verizon and others.
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Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses against spam and viruses, has published a report revealing the top ten viruses and hoaxes causing problems for businesses around the world.