Two Spammers Face Over Five Years
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Two men behind a spam ring that sent millions of pornographic mails are the first to be convicted under new federal spam laws, the Justice Department said.
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Spammers have come close to ruining e-mail--and threaten to do the same to Internet telephony. The time to stop them is now.
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Some five billion spam messages have been sent to recipients using a first-ever, professionally-looking PDF file that advertised a German stock scam.
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A massive "pump and dump" stock scam spam attack was launched yesterday, sending out as many as 5 billion messages touting a German stock to recipients worldwide.
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When spammers are treated more harshly than those who commit war crimes in Rwanda, and are fined more than companies that destroy the environment, it's time to revisit our strategy.
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Dutch authorities have announced that country&#39;s first fines against spammers, including an individual and two companies who sent unsolicited e-mails and mobile telephone text messages.
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Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, NC and his sister Jessica DeGroot, have been convicted of illegal spam activities under a Virginia law. Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison, while his sister received a fine of $7500.
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Two North Carolina residents Wednesday became the first people in the nation to be convicted on felony spamming charges after a Loudoun County jury found that they flooded tens of thousands of America Online e-mail accounts with unsolicited e-mail, prosecutors said. -The Washington Post
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In ordering a New Hampshire man to stop sending spyware that takes over parts of a user&#39;s computer, a federal judge has sent a warning shot at spammers in the United States.
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Two Texas men have been charged with securities fraud for hijacking millions of computers in order to route spam through them. Darrel and Jack Uselton are, apparently, repeat offenders.
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There's an old parable that goes like this:A man is sentenced to death by the king. In desperation, he asks that his life be spared if he can teach a pig to sing. The king agrees, and gives the man a year. Walking the man back to his cell, a guard comments that it seems like a foolish bargain; he doesn't really expect to be able to do it, does he? The man replies, "A lot can happen in a year. The king could die. I could die. Or who knows, maybe the pig will learn to sing."(Maybe it's an allegory. Or a fable. I can never keep these things straight.)I'm using the pig story to segu&#233; into Bayesian spam filters. But first, a quick trip back to spam filters in general. E-mail spam has been around for a while, and different schemes have been developed to determine whether a piece of e-mail is (probably) legit, or whether it's spam. One way is to create a blacklist of senders: Nothing from, say, 123junk.com is allowed into your inbox. Another is a whitelist: If you aren't an approved sender (e.g., mom, dad, Cousin Jimmy), you're mail won't go through. A third is the 'word search,' which looks for the kinds of words that rarely make it into a legitimate e-mail: "Viagra" springs to mind, and there are plenty of others that can't be printed on a family Web site. All of these anti-spam techniques have problems, mostly because they were either too narrowly focused to be effective, or because they were too easy for spammers to get around.But then came a different kind of spam filter - one based on the work of an obscure mathematician from the 18th century. One that works.Reverend TomThomas Bayes was an English Presbyterian minister and mathematician who lived from 1702 to 1761 in and near London. He only published two things while he was alive: a paper that tried to prove that God wants everyone to be happy, and another defending the accuracy of the calculus. After he died, though, is when Bayes's most important work was published. Called "Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances," it was discovered by an acquaintance (one Richard Price, for those of you who like the details) who sent it to the Royal Society which published it in its Philosophical Transactions in 1763.Out of that paper came what's called Bayes's Rule or Bayes's Theorem. It's a formula for guessing how likely it is that something will happen based on two or more independent events. Imagine you want to know what the chances of your 1986 Toyota Corolla making it cross country. Some "independent events" that might stop you are your engine failing, your transmission failing, your tires failing, and so on.To apply Bayesian probability here, you would figure the odds of each of those things, then input those numbers into Bayes's formula (which, by the way, is fairly simple). Let's say you figure the chance of your engine failing is 10%, the chance of your transmission failing is 15%, and the chance of your tires failing is 30%. Popping the numbers into Rev. Tom's formula tells you that the chance of your trip being ruined by any one of these things is actually less than 1%. Happy trails.(Is this counterintuitive? Maybe. Check out another example at Process Software.In 2002, Paul Graham changed the spam war forever when he published an article called "A Plan for Spam". In it, he demonstrated how Bayes's work could be used to sort out spam from legitimate e-mail.Instead of calculating the odds of whether your car will make it across the country, Graham used Bayesian techniques to determine how likely a piece of mail is to be spam. It bases this on how likely each word is to be in a spam message.(By the way, the word "word" is misleading. Bayesian filters also take into account things like Web links, text colors, and font size.)Thus, the more spam messages (and good messages) you get, the more information a Bayesian filter has and the better it gets at identifying junk. A lot of very good anti-spam products are based on Bayesian techniques.And they work very, very well.Basic trainingFirst, a Bayesian filter has to be trained; you need to tell it these are legit messages and these are spam. (Every Bayesian filter has a simple way to do this, usually by having you put all your spam in one mailbox. It then scans that Spam box for spam, and your Inbox for legit mail.)The filter looks at the words in every message to get an idea of what spam looks like. For example, if the word "buy" appears in 100 spam messages and only one legit message, it might be given a score of .99 - there's a 99% chance a message with "buy" in it is spam.On the other hand, the word "column" would (for me) be the opposite; it might appear in 99 legit messages and only one spam, and thus get a score of .01 or one percent.After going through this training process, the Bayesian software ends up with a list of words and their spammish probabilities (often called a "corpus"). When a new message arrives, the filter looks through the words in it and gives each a score based on those 'training' messages. Then it uses Bayes's formula to come up with a score for the message as a whole. If that's above a certain threshold, the message is tagged as spam and either marked, deleted, or separated.But the real beauty of the Bayesian-filter system comes next, when spam gets through. It's bound to do that, because spammers always try new tricks - they put in long passages of poetry, or try to disguise words with odd misspellings, or come up with other ways to sneak by. When a piece of spam ends up in your Inbox, a Bayesian filter has an extra option: one to mark it as junk. Sometimes it's a button or menu choice, other times you just need to move the message to a Spam folder. It also works the other way: Legit messages may land in the Spam box for various reasons, and they must be re-routed. Either way, the filter now knows what the newest kind of spam looks like.Bayesian filters work because they aren't dependent on things that might change: the way words are spelled, or where a message comes from. All they care about is what you say is spam. At least one filter, POPFile, actually lets you set up categories beyond just 'spam' and 'not spam,' so you can teach it to automatically sort out messages on a particular topic.There are a lot of technical ideas out there for curbing the flow of spam, but I'm willing to bet that none of them will work very well. Stopping spam is up to us, and Reverend Bayes has given us a powerful tool.Andrew Kantor is a technology writer, pundit, and know-it-all who covers technology for the Roanoke Times. He's also a former editor for PC Magazine and Internet World. Read more of his work at kantor.com. His column appears Fridays on USATODAY.com.
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A spammer whom authorities say e-mailed more than 9 billion unwanted advertisements for products like erection pills faces a hefty fine: If he needs headache medication or debt relief there's probably an unsolicited ad in his own inbox.
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_ A brother and sister who sent junk e-mail to millions of America Online customers were convicted Wednesday in the first felony prosecution of Internet spam distributors in the United States.
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Texas sued one of the world's largest "spam" e-mail operations on Thursday, seeking millions of dollars from two men it says are responsible for sending illegal messages on the Internet, the state's attorney general said.
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Antispam activists disagree about the effect of the major federal court judgment against three spammers. Antispam activists disagree about whether a $1.08 billion judgment against three spammers in Iowa last
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Application that claimed to "spam the spammers" caused much controversy.
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Microsoft, America Online (AOL), Yahoo and Earthlink have filed a handful of lawsuits against spammers, allegedly targeting some of the world&#39;s largest unsolicited mail offenders.