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The Federal Trade Commission won a preliminary legal victory against what it called one of the largest spam gangs on the Internet, persuading a federal court in Chicago on Tuesday to freeze the group’s assets and order the spam network to shut down.
The group, which used several names but was known among spam-fighting organizations as HerbalKing, sent billions of unsolicited messages to Internet users over the last 20 months, promoting replica watches and a variety of pharmaceuticals, including weight-loss drugs and herbal pills that supposedly enhanced the male anatomy, according to the commission.“This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam,” said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group.
"It wouldn't be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning."
I think that sums it up. That was the very last line of the post. ;)
the group’s Mega-D botnet — named after one of its pill products — was made up of 35,000 computers and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day.
No mention of whether they actually disabled the 35K machines in the botnet.
So they stopped one spammer yet the botnet is just waiting for another bot herder to come along and take control of the botnet, which happens all the time.
Temporary reprieve is all we got.
The answer is to jail the advertisers as well as the spammers.
If more people would send spam back to where it came from, instead of throwing it down a black hole, the DC's and web hosts of this world would do a better job of ridding the net of it.
The "From" address is usually fake. That's why the guy above was receiving 1200 bounces per day for mail that he didn't actually send.
I never bounce this stuff. It goes into a black hole.
Email addresses don't mean a thing, so bouncing by way of them would only serve to defeat the purpose.
Mail servers can be configured to log the originating ip, and the hops it took, from one machine to the next, in order to get to you, so this is what you use.
Of course, upon after configuring your mail server to log originating ip's, you would then do well to learn how to read the mail headers themselves, in order to more effectively return the mail from whence it came.
Though you may not, at times, provide the bounce directly to the spammer, no worries ... most bounces go to the host of the client spammer automagically, thus, putting the host on the spot for change.
Here we would have the spammer's host, getting the spam that was originally intended for you, after which, the client spammer would get a boot to the head from their host.
