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U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison.He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world," said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs.
Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called "zombies" because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected
Forbes [forbes.com]
federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.
I might be in favor of a (slightly) decreased sentence if he identified all his zombies, helped the owners clean their computers, and made financial restitutions to all of them.
Patrick Peterson, vice-president of technology at the internet security and anti-spam group IronPort Systems said that it had seen no notable drop in the volume of spam since Mr Soloway's arrest on Wednesday, with 70 billion messages in a 24-hour period, unchanged from two weeks earlier. The company said that global spam has doubled from about 36 billion a day last May
Graham Cluley, a British technology consultant with the internet security vendor Sophos, said "We see a lot of activity from Eastern European and Russian gangs taking control of botnets, the networks of zombie computers, to spew out spam"
Times Online [technology.timesonline.co.uk]
Most of the Russian gangs seem to have a lot more freshly hijacked computers and are able to deliver much more spam into people’s inboxes,” he said. “The stuff that Robert Soloway had under this control, let’s call it ‘second grade.
Hehehe, I'm sure Robert doesn't like that label. Apparently he is not as big as originally claimed. He was at one point, but lost his status to the Russian gangs.
There will be no peace until there are gateways that can only be crossed by either credentials or pre-approval.
Can anyone link reference an authoritative and detailed analysis of the policy or technical reasons why such a gated or authenticated system will never work? I'd like to know so I can at least give up all hope of a solution. :-(
No one trusts anyone else to be in charge of the gateway, and, frankly, I don't blame them.
Who would run it? Microsoft or Apple? Google or Yahoo? US Government or the United Nations? Why would any applicant trust any other applicant to not abuse that power?
If it's a government, we're talking about exchanging liberty for convenience and that idea makes me nauseous. I'll just click the "Flag as Spam" button, thank you very much.
Junk mail through the door?
The guy who doorsteps you?
The leafleters on the street.
Soloway's spamming is little different from those other forms of unwanted and invasive abuse of public and private resources. Other than the use of an illegally acquired bot-net, the biggest difference that I can see is that major business interests are using junk mail, doorstepping and leafletting.
If it weren't the case then all of those three would have been made illegal many years ago.
Soloway's spamming is little different from those other forms of unwanted and invasive abuse of public and private resources.
What about ...
A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.
I think that's a wee bit different. ;)
Blaming victims is not cool.
Never had junk mail break my mailbox or fill my mailbox to the point no legit mail was getting delivered.
Hope he dies in jail after 30 years of hell.
This was just a small battle won, some people act like it was the whole war.
[edited by: Richard_Overvold at 7:25 pm (utc) on June 5, 2007]
You know who we haven't heard from.. Creators of virus protection software.. Wonder if they are sitting around hoping they catch all the spammers.. Wonder what their purpose would be if that were to happen.
Fortunately all spam mail does not carry viruses. Viruses and Spam are two different things.
