Spam

One of the world's largest Internet providers is hosting illegal spam operations and making an estimated $5 million a year to keep those operations running, according to a report published by the anti-spam group Spamhaus Project Friday.

The non-profit organization, which tracks spam and provides lists of spammers, said it has repeatedly notified MCI (Quote, Chart) that it is helping to host 187 known "spam gangs" around the world, and that it has become known as top spam haven in the world.

If the warnings of security experts are to be believed, we are on the verge of a major onslaught of spam. Writers of malware that co-opts PCs into zombie spam armies have changed tack. Previously, PCs that had been hijacked had been set up as mail servers were and used to send out thousands of e-mails per day directly to... well, most of the world. Now, newer versions of the Trojans are having the compromised computers send the spam through their owners' ISPs.

According to Steve Linford, director of SpamHaus, the onslaught is already underway.

Spammers are increasingly turning to directory attacks against company email servers, according to research carried out by email management company Postini.

Of the 14.7 billion emails monitored by the company last month, spam accounted for 88 per cent and a significant proportion of that spam consisted not of targeted emails but of so-called directory harvest attacks.

Sam - let's call our interviewee Sam, it's suitably anonymous - lives in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in London, drives a vintage Jaguar and runs his own company. But "it's not not all rock and roll and big money", says Sam. What isn't? Spamming websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC (pills, porn and casinos), that's what.

People sending junk email, or spam, in Germany will face fines of as much as 50,000 euros ($65,190) according to a draft law agreed by Germany's ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens.

"Spam email is a big problem. It causes economic problems and costs people a lot of time," Daniel Holstein, a research associate for the Greens, the junior partner in the government, said on Friday.

"We hope that (the fines) will make people think twice about sending spam," he told Reuters. The law will have its first reading in the lower house in the second week of March.

The threat of e-mail viruses, Internet scams and other attacks by spammers grew worse last year, despite stepped-up defense efforts by technology firms and government, an e-mail security firm reported Wednesday.

Spam accounted for about four out of five e-mail messages sent during most of 2004, according to a study by Postini Inc., a Redwood City, Calif., company that screens about 400 million e-mails a day for businesses.

A US man has been arrested for allegedly sending around 800,000 spam emails which attempted to scam money from individuals who believed them to be genuine fundraising messages supporting the Tsunami appeal.

Although some ISPs and legislators are crediting the year-old CAN-SPAM Act and better technology for recent gains in the war on spam, many in the industry say the advances are forcing spammers to employ new tactics, which are destabilizing the Internet's crucial DNS.

One troublesome technique finding favor with spammers involves sending mass mailings in the middle of the night from a domain that has not yet been registered. After the mailings go out, the spammer registers the domain early the next morning.

The Federal Trade Commission charged a group of individuals and companies Tuesday with spamming sexually explicit advertisements that are against the law.

According to an FTC press release, the companies sent hundreds of thousands of e-mail advertisements for pornographic Web sites that did not contain the required "sexually-explicit" warning in the subject line. In addition, the FTC claims many of the e-mails revealed sexually explicit words or images in the subject line, before the recipient even opened the message.

A source from the Internet Society of China's anti-spam team on Wednesday said China has become the world's second largest source of spam, after the United States.

"From the beginning of December to December 19th [2004], another 80 Chinese IP addresses were blocked," said the source which was quoted by the China Business Times.

The source acknowledged that 180 of 400 IP addresses blocked by the International Anti-Spam Organization in November 2004 were Chinese.