Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits

ackthpt writes "Wired is carrying news that Microsoft, America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo are filing suits against spammers under the CANSPAM act. They will 'follow the money' to find the perpetrators and shut them down. Suits currently filed against John Does will have actual names attached once subpoenas get the names of the actual persons. I wish them all the luck, as I clean about 500 pieces of drek a day from my mailboxes." Other readers point to coverage from the BBC and from the Associated Press (here's the AP story as carried by the Boston Globe).

I wonder how effective this will be...

[Zone-MR]

I wonder what effect this will have on the number of spam messages we get daily?

Six spammers is probably a drop in the desert, and shutting them down won't cause a noticable impact, but at least it's a start.

We can only hope . . .

[GMontag]

Well, I hope that they get the actual spammers rather than joe-clueless who's machine was hijacked to spread the spam. Hard to show any intent there, but intent seems to be a victim of the spotlight-seekers much too often.

No, I have no sympathy for joe-clueless, but they do not deserve what spammers deserve.

Hope it works

[Elpacoloco]

Used to be spam tried to tell me something. Now it's so clogged with filter-defeaters that they can't manage to squeeze in a message.

Hope they recover at least their sysadmin's time.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[Like2Byte]

It'll probably be very effective considering that a few spammers are responsible for most of the SPAM anyway.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[blurfus]

But then again, if it is like local auto-theft (in this city anyway) where 5 thieves are responsible for over 80% of the auto-related crime, it could make a difference

These six spammers *may* be responsible for (say) 50% of the spams. It is at least a good 'chunk' to make an impact (if that were the case of course)

imho

Can-Spam is not far enough though

[RandBlade]

Good start, but it doesn't go far enough. Part of the law for Can-Spam they're being prosecuted under is the absence of addresses to get off a mailing list - but who is seriously going to click on a link if they are there? How do we trust them?

This won't stop until spammers start getting locked up for years and people stop buying off them.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[secolactico]

I bet it will have an effect, but more than likely the long-term effect will simply be to move even more of the spam off-shore.

Yes, but will the spam beneficiaries move off shore (like some of the online gambling operators had to)? Unless they are willing to move also, the "follow the money" procedure will get to them.

The tide is turning?

[Overly Critical Guy]

For so long, spam was just "part of the internet." It seems now the tide is turning, where it's gotten so bad that major companies are taking drastic measure to beat it down. Now that the momentum has started, it's only a matter of time before spam is almost completely defeated, though I'm sure we'll always be seeing the occasional "ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!!1" and "KICKFUCKING FLEA BITTEN SLUTS EATING NASTY THINGS OFF THE FLOOR!!1" until the end of time.

10 years from now

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect my inbox to be filled with just as much spam and all the lawyers will be slightly richer.

Re:Huh?

[Cruciform]

It's not so much fighting evil, ask seeking to gain a monopoly on it :)

So?

[A nonymous Coward]

Hitler fought Stalin. Nothing new under the sun.

Re:Maybe the;yy stop blocking my email now

[silas_moeckel]

Why should they accept incomming mail from dynamic IP's? There is no realy good reason to, people sending legitimate mail generaly use a smarthost at there ISP to forward mail though, spambots do not. By funneling mail though a smarthost the ISP can easily setup rules to keep people from getting accounts and sending millions of emails.

Yea this is probably flame bait for slashdot it happens.

Re:Push them underground?

[Tripster]

Umm, they are pretty much underground now aren't they? Considering the spammers are almost exclusively using the trojaned PC network to relay their crap I would say it is as underground as you can get.

This "follow the money" routine will work, the spammers need to get paid at some point, and considering most of their income is based on amount of sales from the spam then you just need to have a nice chat with whomever is accepting the loot and sending the products.

When Will They Sue Uunet?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are #1 on the SBL! 155+ spam gangs are on UUnet. We need to sue UUnet to get all the spammer money that they have received from he spammers that they host. I keep sending mail to as many email addresses of thiers that i can find. Damn spam supporters.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[MadelineAlbright]

Moving offshore will only work to some extent. If laws can be created that allow you to go after the companies who pay the spammers to spam, and we manage to stop the the local companies from paying for spam to be sent, then the only people left are offshore sales companies. But they really don't want to pay for international shipping for a few bottles of viagra, so spam should diminish a fair bit at that point.

137 non-spam???

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

137 of which are non-spam

You get 137 legitimate emails a day? How does that leave you with time to do anything other than read your email?

Reminds me of my brief stint at IBM, circa 1996-1997: I could have spent literally an entire shift doing nothing but reading the utterly inane, purposeless nonsense that the higher-ups foisted on us every day.

To this day, I contend that, for the vast majority of businesses, email [and instant messaging, and pagers, and beepers, and walkie-talkie/blackberry/802.11xyz thingamabobs] cause a net decrease in productivity.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[Albanach]

Spamhaus [spamhaus.org] reckon less than 200 spam outfits make up 90% of spam. So 6% would be a bit more than a drop in the ocean - and if they get caught and face big fines (or jail time) we could see an even bigger impact.

Re:We can only hope . . .

[nizo]

Well, if I understand this right, they are going to follow the trail to the actual person collecting money, so Jim Bob with his hijacked PC should be safe (until his connection gets unplugged, see earliers Comcast article). I can understand the ISPs being pissed at this, I mean imagine if they didn't have to handle piles of spam all day? It must be fun upgrading your mail servers all the time just to handle the 80% increase in spam.

Re:Not Much

[Short Circuit]

Well, they were clever enough to get past my Thunderbird installation's bayesian filter, even after thousands of messages marked as spam.

It's interesting that we're having another of a technology-beats-technology war here. The success one drives the improvement of the other, and vice versa.

Re:Not Much

[DaHat]

On the contrary, I'd argue that spammers tend to be quite smart using intelligently designed tools. Aside from the volume of spam most of us receive daily, it's still not the easiest to filter at times, not because the spammers are dumb, but because they are smart enough to try to keep up with advanced in spam detection so as to be able to bypass them more easily.

Wake me up

[mabu]

when these spammers face criminal charges.... anything less won't make much of a difference. Most of these spammers don't have any money and have probably declared bankruptcy in the past so it'll be no big deal to do so again IF they're even identified, much less lose in court.

What we need is Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison time for spammers. AOL, Microsoft and others should lobby the government to start prosecuting these spammers. You can follow any one of them and find that they've exploited and broken into other computer systems.

These spammers hack AOL accounts, send out viruses and worms, misrepresent themselves, engage in credit card fraud, break into third-party servers and promote fraudulent activity. We have laws against these sorts of things... criminal laws. Why is it that the only action that seems to be taken is civil?

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[Otter]

I wonder what effect this will have on the number of spam messages we get daily?

I realize I'm almost alone here in my sentiment, but -- the tide is turning on spam. It's simply making email unusable. Email is too useful and too important to ISPs, software makers and corporate users for them to allow a handful of morons to destroy it. Something has to be done and therefore something _will_ be done.

I keep saying that here and am always surprised by how confident everyone else is for the spammers. I just don't get you guys -- we're all helpless in the face of big corporations but a bunch of dirtbags flogging V*!*a*g*r*a and Par1s H1lt0n V1d30s! can spit in Bill Gates' face?

Re:What about us?

[PhxBlue]

When was the last time the ISPs hiked up the rates explicitly because of the E-mail traffic they had to filter and handle? Call me old-fashioned, but I'd settle for the lower volume of spam that will result from this action The time I would save is worth more than a 50 coupon.

Re:What about us?

[mabu]

I have to assume that they would include and subpoena the records of the businesses the spammers are promoting.. that's a key method to help identify them. If the companies aren't the employers of the spammers themselves already.

I just hope the criminal authorities also follow the civil case and then nail these people with criminal charges.

Re:spam

[chimpo13]

You aren't paying the postage for those CDs unlike spam. Junk mail is paid for by whoever is sending it.

Re:This should be at least amusing

[njcoder]

Except for some outspoken people that don't know what they're talking about. While people may not like Microsoft, that doesn't mean everything Microsoft does is bad. People and corporate entities are very complex. While you can like something someone does, doesn't mean you like every thing they do. If you hate something someone does, doesn't mean you hate that person or everything they do. To see things otherwise is very simplistic. Unfortunately we have a lot of simple people out there.

To quote Live:
"this is not a black and white world
to be alive i say the colors must swirl
and i believe that maybe today
we will all get to appreciate
the beauty of grey" :)

And the war to create "good spam" has begun

[wayne]

Remeber that the You-Can-Spam act has penalties that are so small that only cost effective for the largest ISPs to can bring claims against spammers. So, only the largest ISPs can really decide which spam gets eliminated. Remember also that you can't bring any claims at all if you are not an ISP.

There is a HUGE potential market out there for "good" bulk advertising out there, if only all the pr0n and scams can be eliminated. These large ISPs have an "existing business relationship" with all their customers, and maybe arguably with those that send email through their servers. Just think of how much these ISPs could make by sending "good" spam from Ford, Pepsi, Pfizer, or PlayBoy.

Re:Huh?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

God, this joke is getting old.

Look, people: there are no angels in this business, and everybody knows it. Microsoft is evil, spammers are evil, AOL and Yahoo! are only slightly less evil than the first two; also on the "evil" list are Apple, Sun, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Adobe, and, well, pretty much any company with yearly revenue in excess of $1 million. Every single one of them would dominate the entire business world, crush the competition, and eliminate all innovation that didn't translate directly into greater short-term profits if they could.

What most of us down here at the bottom of the food chain understand is that it doesn't matter. We support companies -- whether "support" means buying their products or just cheering them on -- not on the basis of their moral purity (because there isn't any) but on the basis of what's most useful to us. If Microsoft spends some portion of its ill-gotten gains on cutting down on the amount of spam I get, that is useful to me, even if everything else they do is not only useless but actively harmful. There's no cognitive dissonance involved.

Re:This should be at least amusing

[Sloppy]

Most slashdotters seem to hate Microsofts army of Lawyers.

You might want to look back. Microsoft is hated, but their "army of lawyers" has been pretty low-profile. When was the last time that army really made any significant trouble for the good guys? Sheesh, even Slashdot was able to stand up to them.

It's the Microsoft lobbyists and salesmen that you have to worry about. Quit thinking of Microsoft as litigious assholes. It's not that I worry about people having ill-will toward MS, but if you think of them as litigious, you're just falling for a feint. That's when you get stabbed in the heart by their real weaponry.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[gnu-generation-one]

predicted responses to the announcement:

# "People will take their illegal business offshore, so we may as well not bother having laws"

# "I filter everything, don't know what you're all complaining about"

# "Only 6 spammers?"

# "I use a challenge-response system, and haven't got an email since.."

Or the usual best

# "But all spammers must be Korean because the proxies they use are in Korea"

What I find amusing is...

[Faw]

.. that MS is going to use the same methods to find the spammers that the RIAA uses to find those that share MP3s, subpoenas against the ISPs. I know some ISPs fought the RIAA (Verizon comes to mind). Wonder if they will fight MS?

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[AndroidCat]

The spam might move off-shore, but the "spam kings" stay right where they are. Just because it's coming through a Korean proxy for a Chinese-hosted site doesn't mean that anyone is really moving. With the legal muscle those ISPs have, the spammer's "off-shore" protection won't last five minutes.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[GSloop]

You're right, the math is off, but the point of the parent is still right.

The 80/20 or 90/10 rules likely still apply. A vast majority of the spam comes from a very small minority. Pick your targets well, and it's likely that the effect would be much larger than one might expect on the ratio of spammers to those who were legally apprehended.

Even on a total spammers to those targeted (200:6) it would be about a 3% drop in spam. If these are some of the most senior/most prolific, the effects might be very much larger than 6%.

(If they give them the death penalty [I wish] I expect the impact might be really large! *grin*)

Cheers,
Greg

Re:At least they're following the money

[swb]

I buy that, but only so far. The feds went nuts busting people selling bongs via mail order, including putting Tommy Chong in jail. Whether you agree or disagree with pot smoking, I think you would agree that "Operation Headhunter" (the official name for the bong busts) was the most ridiculous waste of enforcement dollars, especially compared with the wholesale fraud and destruction to computer systems that goes on in the world of spam.

Prosecutors go after politically expedient and easy targets. I don't doubt that a RICO investigation of even a single spammer would be a huge undertaking -- subpeonas, records, undercover investigations, and it's probably some pretty tricky *law* to practice as well.

It's not as flashy and politically agreeable as throwing a bunch of angry muslims in the clink on trumped up charges.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[iminplaya]

jail time--we are a vengeful bunch aren't we? The state(republic?) of Texas murders more people than any other state.(I say murder because all killing is murder. Save the flames for another thread) Is their crime rate any lower than any other state? Of course not. But revenge is popular. We don't care how the other person reacts. But we got our revenge, and we like it! Let's use the jails for truly dangerous people. If we could bring back the practice of shunning, I think we could bring about real results. The fact is that spamming is profitable, and as long as it remains that way, it will continue(think prohibition, alcohol, drugs, etc.) The best we can and should do is to discourage people from buying from the spammers. Save the revenge for the "Superior Being" of your choice.

Re:I wonder how effective this will be...

[waynelorentz]

You are incorrect. Texas has been surpassed by Virginia. But I guess facts don't matter much to the sort of person who is more concerned about a worthless piece of human trash than the five-year-old boy he kept in a pit filled with urine and feces for six months while stabbing him in the eyes with lit cigarettes for fun. Fortunately, the kid died after a year or so. Too bad we can't say the same for his torturer.

Wanna convince someone to support the death penalty? Just have them sit through five or six death penalty trials and listen to all the gory details, rather than the rhymes of the people outside with magic-marker signs who get to go home to their families at night.

Freedom of speech?

[Martian_Bob]

I don't think this will hold up - it seems to me that this is a revisiting of the FTC's Do-Not-Call list; even though the appeal was upheld [slashdot.org], it's still being slugged out in court. I see this as a similar issue, is commercial speech protected by the first amendment? I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but God knows we don't want to give the current administration more ammo to start monitoring, restricting, and censoring online speech; or have we all forgotten that Patriot Act II [eff.org] may still be around the corner...