hitting the wire*

spammer assassinated.

Rob Stokes of Quirk sent me this gem.

".. Alexey Tolstokozhev (btw, in Russian his name means ‘Thick Skin’), a Russian spammer, was found murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head. According to authorities, this last head shot is a clear mark of russian hit men (known as “killers” in Russia). Tolstokozhev was a famous spammer who sent millions of e-mail promoting viagra, cialis, penis enlargement pills and other medications .."

".. Didn’t your momma tell you that sending spam is bad? .."

http://www.rlslog.net/real-punishment-russian-viagra-spammer-murdered/

I wonder if the lads would like a working holiday in SA?  LOL!

++++++++++++++++

OK!!... looks like we got suckered here!:

It's a hoax.

Should have known it was too good to be true. ;)

good spam info site.

ISOC have a great wiki site for the Spam Bounty Hunter project - thanks to Calvin Browne for pointing me to it (hint noted for adding to the "how to" section ;).  Worth a visit.

<- Love the logo that Joe had made!

I'll give updates on activities Rob Stokes & I plus a growing bunch of IOZ members intend to take on spam and spammers.  It will not be a short, clean or easy fight. I foresee much frustration ahead, but if we can strengthen the legislation and mechanisms to throttle the scourge here in SA... we will.

aluta continua

spam. irritating. pernicious. illegal. immortal.

Spam and spammers refuse to die.  They are harder to kill than a horse fly!

On Thu 2006/09/21 @ 06:59 AM I sent an unsubscribe request in response to an email from a local institution reputed to be notorious for its propensity for sending you unsolicited emails and claiming you had requested said cyber junk mail on their website.

Subsequent to that I received nothing.  Granted, I do have a number of spam filtering mechanisms protecting me, many resident within the Storm network, the final one lurking on my laptop and regularly washing my mail account on the server before Outlook bustles over to check the server.  I gave no more thought to it.

Yesterday, between 11:09 PM & 11:52 PM, I received no less than 3 promotional items from the very same crowd (using a gmail.com account this time), in which they claim:

"xyz.com complies with the Communications ACT. To opt-out from receiving future newsletters, send an e mail to unsubscribe@XXX.com with unsubscribe in the subject line, or click here and enter the e mail address at which you received this newsletter. All unsubscribe requests are honored within 3 working days."

Today, I received 4 more.

So. 

Bearing in mind that this sort of email makes up 70% to 80% of the mail traffic out there on the Net, gobbling up precious bandwidth we could be using to make the Broadband ecosystem work better, do you think the ECT (as opposed to the EC) Act protects us enough?  (note they mention "the Communications Act" above, which could mean the EC Act, or the ECT Act!)

What do you think I should do gentle reader? 

I have unsubscribed a 2nd time, but should I expend some precious time exploring the legal options open to me?  (This involves a tortuous path through SAPS)

Should I reset the parameters of my spam filters, hunker down and try to ignore the buzzing horse fly that is draining scarce resources?

Should I just mail the sad gits a bunch of dead flowers?

you tell me.

Spam - its days are numbered. Or are they?

Could it be that the IETF have finally come up with the answer to that 21st century curse, the unsolicited commercial email (spam to most)?  Am I wrong in being just that teeny bit skeptical?  You be the judge.

A silicon.com newsletter dropped (solicited ;) into my mailbox today with a heading of an article that caught my eye (as hoping mine caught yours).  Seems we're all a bit slow on the uptake as the IETF draft standard is dated February 15, 2007.

The success of DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) relies on everyone who wants to see the end of spam adopting the idea and modifying their mailservers.  That could be a while, apathy being most people's strong suit.  In essence, though the idea is not bad. 

Public Key Encryption has been around for a while - it is the basis of such mechanisms as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and involves anyone who wants to be positively identified as being who they really are on the Net registering a set of "keys" or secret codes with a "certificate authority" (think VeriSign or Thawte).  The keys are mathematically related, but the "private one" (hidden with the authority) cannot be derived from the "public" one (handed out like a electronic ID card).

With DKIM, email servers (good ones) will quietly attach "invisible" keys to all outgoing mail.  Email servers that are correctly configured will then be able to check the keys against an authority and either let the mail through unhindered, or flag it as junk.  Up to ISPs and recipients as to how they then deal with them.

Other than being an IETF initiative (not an insignificant influence in Net terms) the likes of AOL, IBM, IronPort Systems, Trend Micro and VeriSign are supporting this.

So... will you modifying your server to adopt the standard?  Will you be lobbying your ISP  to do so?  Or will you go with life, attacking the shoots of the noxious,invasive weed instead of hacking off its roots?

I reckon this has legs.... and you?

What price do we put on fighting Spam on our customer's behalf?

I read an article on PC World that struck a chord.

As an Internet Service Provider, Storm has invested a lot in anti-spam measures.  Before  SMTP sessions are accepted from 'foreign' mailservers, we run checks.  We have debated various rigorous measures with unfortunate side effects at length before reluctantly dropping them.  We've even fired a channel partner for spamming South African email users.  Quite frankly, spam, spammers and the guys who supply them with email addresses p*ss me off!  If I had my way, they'd be keel-hauled, hung, drawn and quartered, then used as chum.

I suggested to our news@storm list (a wee bit tongue in cheek) that we lift our guards for a day to let our customers see what we quietly do for them (at no charge!) behind the scenes. Aish! - responses I got.  The techies are all for it of course - they're the ones sweating with little recognition. The helpdesk and the Ops manager were for some reason less enthusiastic?! ;)

I'm for priming our customers for "Storm Spam Day" - when we lift our skirts and let the ravening horde of barbarians in for the day! ;)

Some stats to reveal the extent of it:

On the setup in Cape Town alone just short of 60% of mail smaller than 250k is being rejected as SPAM and that figure is after we have already rejected mail based on other tests (the SMTP sessions check with 'foreign' mailservers mentioned above). On one of the blacklists we implemented a few months ago we dropped 159,133 SMTP connections in Cape Town yesterday.

Viruses are not so bad, we stopped 3207 for the day.

That's me.  I'm off to the dentist.  Broke a tooth on a marshmallow (I kid you not!)