FC: Vigilantes give spammers a dose of their own medicine --WSJ

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---

From: "Michael E. Etchison \(MLE\)" <etchison () mleconsulting com>
To: "'Declan McCullagh'" <declan () well com>
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."

...




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