--- From: "Michael E. Etchison \(MLE\)" <etchisonat_private> To: "'Declan McCullagh'" <declanat_private> Subject: [ABA-LAWTECH] AP: Vigilantes give spammers a dose of their own medicine Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 00:45:44 -0500 [just in case you missed this. m.e.e.] Vigilantes give spammers a dose of their own medicine By MYLENE MANGALINDAN The Associated Press 5/19/03 9:22 AM The Wall Street Journal When all 24 office phones at Scott Richter's e-mail marketing company started ringing at once, with nobody at the other end of the line, employees knew they were under attack again. Daniel Dye, the systems administrator, could do little. After 15 minutes into the lunchtime assault last month, Mr. Dye recalls yelling, "Go ahead and pull your phones out of the walls for now. It'll be easier to think about what to do." Examining the phone system's central computer, Mr. Dye found that someone had hacked into it and programmed a feature that caused all the phones to ring at the same time. Mr. Richter's company had been "flamed" -- attacked by a shadowy group of vigilantes who have taken to harassing spammers using just about any means they can dream up. Spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail, has set off a war between marketers and people who hate spam. Mr. Richter, who is a mass commercial e-mailer, has become a frequent target of attackers known as antispammers. They form a loose affiliation that uses the Internet to coordinate attacks from around the world. E-mail marketers often feel powerless against them. "It's an underground cult running it," says Mr. Richter, whose Westminster, Colo., e-mail marketing business, Optinrealbig.com, pitches mortgages, adult- related products and Viagra. "You don't know who they are." Here's one of them: Mark Jones, a 26-year-old software engineer in Enterprise, Ala., who calls himself a "soldier" in the war against spam. >From his home at night, he tracks down spammers by tracing the complex routing code hidden in e-mail messages. He reports them to what antispammers call "realtime blacklists," Web sites that track known spam sources and allow computer administrators to block certain Internet addresses. Then, he fights back. "Anytime we find a source of spam," he says, "we spam them back." After his three children were asleep late one Saturday night last November, Mr. Jones sat down at his PC for a bit of spammer-flaming. First, he says, he visited a Web site, slashdot.org, that's a favorite among techies; he pulled down a list of about 10 alleged spammers. He programmed his personal computer to send a letter to each supposed spammer in the same way many spammers do: through so-called open relays and mail servers that forward e-mail in ways that make it hard to track down the sender. As his finishing stroke, he had his PC send the message to each spammer 10,000 times. "We use the same methods the spammers use," says Mr. Jones, chuckling. "It's a bombardment." ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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