Robert Soloway from Seattle was once consider the eighth largest spammer in the world, now he’s the first biggest loser. He has been arrested and charged with multiple counts of mail and electronic fraud. He also charged with operating a bot-net used to send out spam to a database of 150 million email addresses. Soloway has been in legal trouble before, in fact an Oklahoma ISP sued under the CAN-SPAM act and after firing his lawyer and refusing to show up to court the ISP got the default $10 million dollar judgment. For his crimes he is facing up to 26 years in jail and up to a $625,000 in fines, but since he’s broke that doesn’t really matter. Just goes to show that crime doesn’t pay especially spamming.

Tags: can spam act, CAN-SPAM, email, jail, spam

F-secure has noticed a trend that more malware is being spread though FTP. As most can remember when viruses and other nasties were spread through email attachments, well that’s be fairly well defeated. Then came the drive-by-downloaders which use http to transfer the infectious payload, that’s been slowing down since browsers have evolved. Now though there is a new way to become infected, through trusty old FTP. How this happens is that a user receives a spam email with some links claiming they have an offer which can’t be refused and as we all know most really can’t refuse it. So the unsuspecting user clicks the link and a ftp connection to some bot-net controlled computer is initiated and some infected files downloaded. So now there is one more thing to scan for in your emails.

Tags: computer, IT, malware, spam

Today when I logged into my blog I was greeted by a lovely little dialog saying that I currently had 43 new spam comments. This is after not logging in for a weekend. They where all simple two to three word spams all from different ip addresses. The were all on one post so I disabled comments on that post. I think I’m going to find a plugin to automatically disable comments on old posts. If any one knows of one for wordpress 2.1 please let me know. When will the spammers learn that as much as they love to spam everyone else loves to block them.

Tags: spam, wordpress

I’ve been hit by the first of many to come spamming runs. I was greeted by 4 spam comments this afternoon, quite vulgar and graphic, that had been caught by Askimet spam filter (thanks to WordPress for including this spam protection). I knew it wouldn’t be long before my new blog would be hit with this scum. It actually took longer than I expected probably due to the fact that I not only changed the backend blog software but I’m using a new domain and link structure.

Tags: spam, tech

Even if my distaste for Myspace is so great that I’ve blocked all access to it at my house I have to admit they doing something good. Zdnet has the rest of the details here. Basically after a phishing scheme that compromised thousands of accounts, a clown that goes by the name ‘Spam King’ used those accounts to post spam to Myspace bulletins. So Myspace is now suing the ‘Kings’ pants off. This comes after Microsoft already sued the same guy for $7 million dollars for the same thing. This makes me think if he can afford a lawsuit like that and still go about business, no wonder some many people are sending spam because it’s so profitable.

It just wouldn’t be so profitable if everyone and their grandma set up a hotmail or yahoo account and then slung their address all over the internet. Then they think that this is a wonderful offer for Ma13 3nhanc3m3nt$ and that some prince in Nigeria would actually contact them for help, so lets send them our money. I guess that some blame has to be given to Mail admins who don’t have the resources to filter out all the crap that come through their servers. But with spammers taking over thousands of PC’s and using those to spam, which effectively makes most RBL just a waste of bandwidth. But I guess it’s just something that everyone will have to deal with whether we like it or not.

Now if you would excuse me I need to put my Soapbox away, don’t want anyone tripping over it you know.

Tags: spam