Tracking the spammer hackers

July 2, 2003 7:54 AM

"Mail order brides are not British Airway's normal line of business." BBC reporter wonders where his spam comes from and is surprised to learn that a major airline has become an unwitting accomplice with a trail leading through South America, Moscow, and Scandinavia.
posted by dirtylittlemonkey (7 comments total)

Via Slashdot
posted by dirtylittlemonkey at 7:57 AM on July 2, 2003

I'm sorry, but I could find no mention of Scandinavia in that article.

Perhaps Belgium moved?
posted by spazzm at 8:14 AM on July 2, 2003

I just can't understand how these people make money. Why would anyone respond to spam...or a telemarketer for that matter?
posted by jeblis at 8:21 AM on July 2, 2003

spazzm - my thought exactly. Did we miss something?
posted by widdershins at 8:29 AM on July 2, 2003

ehh, Read Amsterdam, thought Netherlands, and it came out Scandinavia. It must be that Ikea sectional I have my eye on.
posted by dirtylittlemonkey at 8:38 AM on July 2, 2003

jeblis: It helps when you aren't paying for your connection or hosting, but can get a major corporation to accidentally do it for free (as in this article). That can't help but improve the gross margins!

The moral of this story is to use a firewall, know what is supposed to be hosted on your boxen, and periodically check for "unusual" activity.
posted by ilsa at 11:05 AM on July 2, 2003

If you have ever been hijacked by spammers in any way, you will be familiar with the feeling of helplessness that can result. After being threatened with immediate cancellation of my hosting reseller account, I was recently forced to remove a customer's domain name from the hosting server, as it ended up being the only way to send the spammers elsewhere. It was as simple as using forged headers on the spam they were sending out to have thousands of messages come through my server every day that were either bounce messages (if you send out 5 or 10 million e-mails, you are bound to get several thousand bad addresses at least) or people replying to the message saying "why did you send me a virus, I don't even know you?" Yes, they were not only using a domain I host as their reply-to address, they had used it to propagate a worm. I could hardly believe the number of questions like this that came back.

To answer your question jeblis, these are the people who respond to spam and who are the source of income for these scum-sucking, bottom-feeding slimebags.
posted by dg at 4:35 PM on July 3, 2003