Posted on 02/23/2005 7:11:07 AM PST by holymoly
[Technology News]: Spam fighters are cheering from the sidelines a recent US court decision that dovetails with their technological efforts to turn the tidal wave of spam that threatens to drown the world's computer networks.
Jeremy Jaynes was found guilty last November by a state court in Leesburg, Virginia, of sending more than 10 million unsolicited emails a day. He was hawking pornography, work-at-home schemes and stock-picking software.
The spams are estimated to have earned him about $750,000 a month. He is now on $1 million bail, forbidden from using the internet and will be sentenced this month. The jury has recommended he gets a nine-year jail term.
"A successful trial with all the time and resources we're spending on this issue just feels so good," says Jonathan Zdziarsky, an anti-spam software expert.
Washington-based Internet Law Group lawyer Jon Praed, an observer at Jaynes' trial, says it was the first time criminal law had been used so well against a spammer, and the case highlights how legislation and technology are joining to beat spam. "Everyone in the court understood that this verdict was a precedent-setting, awe-inspiring moment," he says.
Jaynes' operation was run from a chaotic office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Cabling to 16 high-speed internet links snaked everywhere. There were CDs packed with spammed email addresses and servers with spam emails. Even as the police arrived, spamming was in progress. The place was littered with to-do lists. One read simply: "Solve spam filters".
That note provided a rare window into how spammers think, says Paul Graham, author of the first content-based spam filter and organiser of a recent anti-spam MIT conference. He says it shows that spammers believe email filters are easier to beat than they really are.
Filters installed by the ISP are the main line of defence against spam. These scan messages for words typical of unsolicited commercial emails, and discard those that they find.
But a percentage always seeps through, partly because spammers are sometimes able to fool the scanners by including large quantities of random text in their messages.
Spammers improve the chances that at least some of their messages will get through by using viruses that turn infected computers into "zombie" machines that are fooled into sending spam.
But Praed says technology alone will not to stem the flood of unsolicited email: "The solution to spam is the marriage of technology and law." Lawyers are just beginning to learn how to use Australian and European Union laws enacted in 2003, and the US federal Can-Spam Act, to bring spammers to book.
Project Honeypot, the brainchild of Chicago lawyer Matthew Prince, is a marriage of law and technology. It takes advantage of a clause in the Can-Spam Act that makes harvesting email addresses for spamming purposes illegal. Spammers collect email addresses using "crawler" software that trawls websites looking for them. These addresses are the spammers' lifeblood, and Prince hopes to cut it off.
Webmasters who want to help fight spam download Project Honeypot's software, which is designed to turn their website into a magnet for harvesters.
If the site detects that a crawler is visiting, the software generates a fake email address for the crawler to grab, and records the address of the crawler and the time and date. The fake address then vanishes from the site, but remains valid as a mailbox. Because it is a fake, no one will send it legitimate mail. If any mail arrives it can only have come from the spammer who grabbed it off the Honeypot site.
Detectives then begin building their case.
Three months into Project Honeypot, Prince is using the data the software returns to plot spamming networks for future busts.
"These are the tools and data we need," Praed says.
In the spamming arms race, spammers are likely to begin programming their harvesters to detect honeypots and ignore them. But Prince says he is ready for this with counter measures.
And you can look in the message body. Anything lacking a sales pitch or even link is probably just a typo.
Me, too, annie... I've used mailwasher for years to bounce spam back to the sender. Recently, it has become erratic about bouncing- can't figure out why, but often as not, it won't bounce spam-- so I am trying this one, which seems to bounce reliably:
IncrediMail - Email has Finally Evolved
| Backgrounds for your Email IncrediMail lets you take full control over what your emails look like. Select from hundreds of email ... www.incredimail.com/ - 13k - |
The install is fairly automatic, it imports your accounts, and reading the furnished tutorials will explain how to filter and bounce spam. Some folks claim you shouldn't bounce the garbage, but it gives me great satisfaction, anyway.
Thanks, BH!
They should all be triple fined for lost time and damages, frog-marched to the public square, stripped, whipped, and then chained to the whipping post for a week, and made to trim the grass-- one blade at a time, with manicure scissors.
All while wearing a shirt saying "I was a CyberVandal."
Anyone idiotic enough to respond or do business with a spamvertised lender, however remotely, is too stupid to have a house, anyway. I don't want them as neighbors.
Wired did an informal study on this once (actually responding to spam), for the most part, things were either scams or no response -- the latter was apparently a way to verify "hot" email addresses to sell to other spammers.
Oddly enough, Wired found that porn spammers generally were the most "legit", in that they were in the business of providing exactly what they said they would far more often than other types of spam...
But that entire industry assumes that most "customers" would be hesitant to complain when scammed.
I recommend that he get drawing and quartering.
I've used mailwasher for years to bounce spam back to the sender. Recently, it has become erratic about bouncing- can't figure out why, but often as not, it won't bounce spam-- so I am trying this one, which seems to bounce reliably:
IncrediMail - Email has Finally Evolved
| Backgrounds for your Email IncrediMail lets you take full control over what your emails look like. Select from hundreds of email ... www.incredimail.com/ - 13k - |
The install is fairly automatic, it imports your accounts, and reading the furnished tutorials will explain how to filter and bounce spam. Some folks claim you shouldn't bounce the garbage, but it gives me great satisfaction, anyway.
In the couple of days I've bounced spam with Incredimail, there has been a noticable drop in the amount of spam coming into my Junk mailbox. It seems to be doing some good.
I still want to see the vermin crippled financially, jailed, horsewhipped, and humiliated.
I thought I read on another thread a day or two ago the IncrediMail was a spyware.
Am I mistaken?
I want something to filter out these e-mails. Until a few months ago I only had a few per week. Lately I get about 5-10 per day. Really sick of it.
I've set up filters for .de, ru.,au.,as., etc. but the next day I get a stack from a new source.
Making me crazy.
All I can tell you is that MSantispyware, Ad-Aware, and Spybot don't say a thing when scanning it. For whatever that's worth.
(Denny Crane: "There are two places to find the truth. First God and then Fox News.")
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