Spam

A US-based ISP has been awarded $11.2bn (£6.38bn) in a judgement against a Florida spammer who sent millions of unsolicited emails to its users.

The damages were awarded to CIS Internet Services, according to a the report by Associated Press.

Robert Kramer, the owner of CIS, filed a lawsuit against James McCalla and other defendants in 2003 claiming that more than 280 million spam email messages were sent to CIS email accounts. The emails advertised mortgages, debt consolidation services, pornographic and gambling Web sites.

Some antispam vendors and computer users don't see the same picture the Federal Trade Commission viewed in its recent report that many people now get less unsolicited commercial e-mail in their inboxes than two years ago.

The spam problem isn't shrinking, said Ray Everett-Church, counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and author of the new book, "Fighting Spam for Dummies."

"Technology has improved incrementally in the last year, but spam volumes remain at all-time highs by most measures," Everett-Church said.

The federal government this week lauded the Spam Act 2003 as a "leading legislative model" in fighting unsolicited bulk electronic messaging and claimed "many professional spammers that had been based in Australia have either shut up shop or left the country".

However, Australian legislation can at best have only a minimal impact on spam being sent to Australians. The vast majority of such messages come from overseas.

THE government's "Spam tsar" is running up the white flag in the war against junk e-mail, warning that the only way to stop unwanted messages is to buy blocking software for computers.

It’s tough being an average-Joe spammer these days. Divorced and in his 40s, Mike has two kids to help support, a skyrocketing home heating bill, and a mortgage. And spamming just isn’t paying the bills like it used to.

A man described as one of the nation's leading senders of spam says an FBI raid on his home office has halted his e-mail operation.

Warrants unsealed last week show that a September raid on Alan M. Ralsky's home in a Detroit suburb included the seizure of financial records, computers and disks.

"We're out of business at this point in time," Ralsky said. "They didn't shut us down. They took all our equipment, which had the effect of shutting us down."

Terry Berg, the top deputy in the Detroit U.S. attorney's office, declined to comment.

Despite legislative and legal pressure, the United States remains the world’s worst offender when it comes to the origin of spam, though South Korea and China are fast catching up, a software security company said Wednesday.

To identify the top 12 countries where span originates, London-based enterprise security software company Sophos looked at spam messages received in its network of spam traps.

The U.S. was responsible for 26.5 percent of the all spam trapped in Sophos’ networks between April and September 2005.

An Arizona appellate court ruled Tuesday that a 1991 federal law's ban against using autodialers to call cell phones applies to sending e-mail text messages with unsolicited advertisements -- a technology not in vogue when the law was enacted.

Industry groups around the country are starting to employ new technical efforts to stem the dark tide of spam. These efforts range from placing new kinds of electronic signatures on outgoing e-mail to identifying and controlling the routes taken by unwanted messages.

As Iran is threatening to resume uranium-converting operations at a nuclear facility in Isfahan, spammers are taking advantage of the situation with another bogus junk email campaign.

The emails, which link to Trojan spreading websites, are purporting to contain news stories of the nuclear stand-off between the EU and Iran, according to antivirus firm Sophos.

The campaign is the latest bid to fool internet users into downloading malware.