Re: Spam wars (was test)

Richard Robinson30/11/03 4:58 PM

> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chris Rockcliffe
> wrote:
>> Jacey Bedford30/11/03 5:42 AM
>> 
>>> I think we'd better enjoy the internet while we can because if spams
>>> keep increasing at this rate, within another year it will be more
>>> trouble than it's worth and we'll all go back to writing letters ad
>>> making phone calls.
>> 
>> The bulk of it is coming from the USA State of Florida I understand -
>> perhaps as much as 80%.  I doubt the Bush regime will do anything about it
>> fast.  It is already killing the Internet and computer use for many people.
> 
> I think this may be overstating it just a little ?

OK this is really OT, but very important.  Many of us are very badly
affected by it.

Overstating?  I meant to say, it is killing Usenet and e-mail... a big part
of the Internet for many people.  If you add together commercial spam in
e-mail, deliberately abusive spam and deliberately destructive posts and
crossposts in Usenet - it is all devaluing, ruining, or even killing off the
huge benefits of computer communications for a great many people.

As regards the USA thing...  I lifted this a while back...

MAIL OUT OF ORDER

Glamorous locations, death threats and big money deals. Neil McIntosh
reports on the battle for control of your inbox

Thursday February 27, 2003
The Guardian 

Golden beaches, palm tree-lined streets, manicured golf courses and giant
motor yachts moored at the marinas: Boca Raton in Florida is a millionaire's
paradise. It's also the spam capital of the world.

"The amount of spammers resident in Boca Raton is incredible," says Steve
Linford, a London-based catcher of the unwanted emails that deluge almost
every inbox in the world. "There are really only 150 spammers doing 90% of
all the spam we get in the US and Europe... at least 40 of them are in Boca
Raton." 

Nobody knows for sure why so much junk email flows out of the town. It might
be down to Florida's relaxed laws on spamming. Some also suspect they are
sent on behalf of the state's notorious criminal community - spam and crime,
especially fraud, are closely linked. Or the locals might simply be
following the lead offered by their governor, Jeb Bush, whose re-election
campaign last year was accused of spamming.

Whatever the reason, Linford is glad of the physical distance between him
and some of the world's most prolific junk emailers. As the head of a
volunteer spam-stopping campaign called Spamhaus, which claims to protect
more than 100m email inboxes around the world, he's at the front line of the
anti-spam effort. 

Linford and his mostly US-based team compile the Spamhaus Block List (SBL):
a list of known spammers' IP addresses (the address allocated to every
computer connected to the net). The SBL is provided free to internet service
providers around the world, and is effective at blocking known sources of
spam. 

As a result, he's not a popular man down in Boca Raton.

"We get a lot of death threats," says Linford, in a matter-of-fact way. "At
least two or three a month. Spammers actually phone here to say 'we're going
to cut your throat'," he adds, with a chuckle.

Linford has never suffered anything more than these threats - other than
"near continuous" cyber assaults on his servers. But they do indicate that
spamming is becoming a serious business, on which serious amounts of money
are riding. 

Indeed, if you have had the feeling recently that the amount of spam in your
inbox was getting much, much worse, your instincts are quite correct. In
2001, junk email accounted for only 8% of all email. Last year, it was 40%.
That amounts, according to researchers at IDC, to 870bn spam messages in one
year - in North America alone.

Spam continues to grow at a rapid rate: in January last year, Brightmail, a
spam-fighting company, counted 2.7m spam attacks on the internet (one spam
attack can mean many million individual spam messages being sent out). Last
month, that number had climbed to more than 6m. IDC, perhaps conservatively,
predicts the number of spams sent in North America will top 1bn this year.

But if indications on the sheer volume of spam turn out to be correct, we
tend to be wrong about the kinds of spam we get.

With their lurid subject lines and graphic content, we tend to assume most
spam is sexual. Yet around 82% of spam has nothing to do with porn sites or
sex, according to Brightmail.

In fact, one-third of email fits under the much less salacious category of
"products" - cheap ink cartridges and the like. Twenty-four percent are
financial offers - "low-cost loans", credit card offers and more. Scams make
up just 5%, although these - like the sexual emails - attract a
disproportionate amount of attention.

In the background, spammers and spam-fighters are slugging it out in an
attempt to gain control of the email medium. And, like rat catchers in the
days of the plague, this is a very good time to be in the anti-spam
business. 

In a windowless room in an anonymous San Francisco office block, a handful
of young men in T-shirts and jeans watch an array of monitors. The room is
nicknamed "the Bloc", and these men are the spam-catchers for Brightmail.
They are monitoring millions of "decoy" email addresses - the traps into
which unwitting spammers fall.

Brightmail's technology takes advantage of the way spam finds new
recipients. "One of their techniques is simply intelligent guessing," says
the company's chief executive, Enrique Salem. "They do what is called a
dictionary attack, where they will grab a dictionary of names - common first
names, common last names - and combine them. They test all these names until
they find one. It's a brute-force thing - they have computers and they don't
mind working all night."

So Brightmail has a network of millions of email addresses, based at the
internet service providers it serves. When a spammer makes a guess at an
address, and sends spam to one of these Brightmail traps, the message comes
back to the Bloc. There, it is automatically compared to messages arriving
at other Brightmail addresses and, if they spot a spam attack under way, the
message goes out: block this message, it is spam.

It's an effective means of stopping the rogue emails: in December, they
checked 40bn messages and found 16bn were spam. But spammers are aware of
the techniques being used to catch them, and they are adapting.

"Spam is changing every day," says Salem. "I can show you some examples
where, to the human eye, the mails look identical, but the spammers will
embed hidden text in the message which you can't see. So when the filters
try to look at that, they can't catch it." It is a constant game of
technological cat and mouse.

It is also a very profitable game for Brightmail - the company sells its
spam-sifting services for $5-$15 per user per year to companies who want to
lighten their employees' inboxes. Revenues at the privately held company are
said to have doubled last year, and Salem says he expects the start-up to
become profitable this spring.

Some legislators are keen to add legal weight to the fight. In this country,
the most frequently heard voice is that of Derek Wyatt, chairman of the
House of Commons all party internet group. He advocates forcing internet
service providers (ISPs) through licensing to take steps to block spam
before it arrives in inboxes.

"From a legislative point of view, the best way to do it would be to charge
the ISPs a license fee," he says. "They wouldn't like that. Why wouldn't
they like that? Because they would have to become accountable."

The MP wants Ofcom, the new communications regulator, to take responsibility
for licensing internet service providers - and fine those who fail to meet
agreed standards. 

"They should say 'you sign up for this, and if you don't do this, here are
the fines'," he says. "If, after two years, spam goes to 45% or 61% [of all
email] - the whole world will be jammed."

Wyatt is now working to set up a "shadow select committee" to look into the
growing crisis of spam. Stephen Timms, minister of state for e-commerce and
competitiveness, has already agreed to appear before the cross-party
committee, which is likely to convene within the next three weeks.

Wyatt's views on regulation are controversial - the big ISPs insist they are
not responsible for spam, which often comes through unprotected mail servers
or hijacked machines.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of ISPs are looking to technology to help
them: employing systems to cut down on the amount of spam their customers
receive. 

In the UK, BT Openworld launched a Brightmail-powered anti-spam service as a
free optional extra for its customers in November. Already, more than 30% of
those customers who use the company's email system have signed up.

"It's the fastest take-up of any opt-in service we've ever done," says Neil
Scoresby, BT Openworld's consumer portal head. A similar service for "pay as
you go" users, priced at around £1 a month, is likely to launch in April.

In the United States, meanwhile, there appear to be more concerted attempts
to stem the flow of spam. After years of procrastination, Congress may soon
pass legislation aimed at attacking the problem in the US.

Previous attempts have been thwarted by, among other things, concerted
lobbying by the powerful Direct Marketing Association. However, the associa
tion has recently performed a u-turn and says it will now lobby for
anti-spam laws. 

In Europe, legislation is already in place: the EU's data protection
initiative will mean that by the end of this year, commercial bulk emailers
based in Europe will only be able to email those people who have
specifically opted in to their mailing list.

The technology industry's big guns are taking aim at the spammers as well.
America Online revealed last week it was blocking around 750m spams a day;
it said it would be introducing more sophisticated spam-countering measures
later this year, and toughening its stance on spammers who use its network.
Microsoft also announced it intends to bring a series of lawsuits against
spammers it accuses of raiding its Hotmail service for email addresses.

Spamhaus's Linford remains sceptical, however, that changes in the law will
do much to change the spammers' behaviour, or that they will even turn up
for the court hearings if caught. "These people are fraudsters to start
with," he says. "The number one rule about any spammer is that they are
chronic liars. 

"They'll tell you immediately that you opted in [to their mailing list]. And
they'll swear blind that they didn't do it. They lie from morning to night.
So even death threats we take to be the normal spammer thing, although the
top 5% to 10% of spammers have criminal records for pretty bad things...
money laundering, drugs trafficking, theft, violence, all sorts of things."

It is a fight that, for Linford and his fellow volunteers, seems to have
taken on moral tones: good versus evil, right versus wrong. And it looks
likely to continue for some time yet. But, as he says, it is one he feels
the anti-spammers must win.

"How many companies would like even just to send out one email each if
spamming were allowed?" he asks. "If you can imagine how many small
businesses would like to spam everybody in the world - and work out how many
there are in the UK and North America - and then imagine each of them
sending you just one spam per year. How many spams would you get each day?
This is the problem - spam cannot scale."
==========
Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

BOGUS BOCA - THE SPA FOR SPAM

Poor Boca. It's as if infamy has taken up permanent residence.

Such a startling number of Boca Raton firms have been linked to fraudulent
schemes. Boca operations have been nabbed selling time shares in fictitious
vacation homes, running the 1-900 ''call because you have won a new
Cadillac'' telemarketing rip-offs. The ''preapproved'' loan scams were so
Boca.

Partnerships were sold for nonexistent vending machines. Boca schemers
peddled fake oil and gas wells. Donations were sought for phantom charities.

Last year Boca police busted a matchmaker who collected $2,755,450 from
lonely clients without delivering a hubby.

Boca Raton hosted currency trading schemes and rare coins scams. But Boca's
unsavory reputation was built on fraudulent stocks and securities. Former
Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Richard Breeden once called Boca
"the only coastal town in Florida where there are more sharks on land than
in the water".

But now Boca, with help from Eddy Marin, has gone legit.

Of course, Marin's mighty spam operations won't exactly enhance Boca's
reputation. But at least they're legal.

'SPAM CAPITAL'

Marin and other Internet entrepreneurs based in Boca have conferred yet
another superlative on their town. Last week, the Guardian newspaper in
London wrote: ``Golden beaches, palm tree-lined streets, manicured golf
courses and giant motor yachts moored at the marinas: Boca Raton in Florida
is a millionaire's paradise. It's also the spam capital of the world.''

London's Evening Standard said this ''soulless beach town'' was once ``known
as a retirement haven for New Yorkers. Now its business is spam. The very
spam capital of the universe.''

The Evening Standard was apparently unaware of the town's previous rep. Spam
may be despised by anyone with an E-mail address. But spam ain't scam.

The sudden English interest in Boca Raton followed a lawsuit filed in
federal court in Fort Lauderdale last month on behalf of some unnamed Boca
spammers against archenemy Spamhaus, the London-based anti-spam project.

JOBS AT RISK?

Spamhaus, which helps Internet providers intercept unsolicited commercial
E-mail, was accused of interfering with spammers' right to do business.
"Should the defendants be allowed to continue their assault . . . the
plaintiff's industry will cease to exist. This will cause more Americans to
become unemployed."

Spamhaus has suggested that 40 of the world's 200 most prolific spam
operations operate in the Boca area. And that Eddy Marin is the very king of
spam dispensers.

Eddy Marin did not return a phone call Wednesday. But one should note that
spam is not illegal. That's a major improvement on his résumé. Marin, 41,
was busted and convicted in 1990 for running a major cocaine ring in Broward
County, big enough to implicate 15 others, including former Broward County
Judge James Holmes.

A convicted coke dealer, who also dabbles in Internet porn and is currently
fending off money- laundering charges, Marin presents a near-perfect front
man for the most hated industry in the high-tech world. Probably, the town
fathers won't nominate Eddy, however successful, for Boca businessman of the
year.

But at least spam's legit. For Boca, that's a step up.

> Which needs a bit of thinking and extra trouble. So maybe what'll happen is
> that the "easy to use" bubble will burst and it'll all revert to what it was
> like 10 years ago, when you were expected to be techy and understand things,

The spam I get, seems to be all from a couple of dozen outfits at most.  The
headers are disguised and changed with random characters... but surely the
ISPs know where the posts are originating.  No amount of posting and
clicking on removal tags works.  In fact it probably just reinforces the
address as being "live".

I think if they wanted to, ISPs could stop the bulk of it tomorrow.  They
may think that it would be the thin end of a "content control" wedge.  If
they're not doing anything, then there must be too much money at stake.

It's a bit like Yellow Pages.  YP know who most of the crooked,
irresponsible and criminal traders are (i.e. Dodgy plumbers, roofers,
builders, driveways, etc etc). They get feedback on them all the time and
they know who is dodgy - even when they change their trading names.

They could cut out rip-off merchants by 80-90% and help reduce crime and the
often elderly victims of it.  But their attitude is why should they help cut
crime (it's not our job they say).  After all, the con men and rip-off
merchants pay YP huge sums to put their often large display ads in YP
directories?  Do the shareholders give a shit?... No.

> but with a constant resource drain due to permanent infestation by invisible
> parasites. And then ISPs will start filtering, and real mail will get lost
> along with the junk ... coming soon, a patent on Bayesian statistics ...
> 
> <summary>
> It's a PITA.

Agreed on.

CR