Spammer Goes Down

Spam king, Daniel Lin has acknowledged in court that he is guilty of violating the federal anti-spam law known as the CAN-SPAM act. All three charges were felonies, and will likely result in substantial jail time and fines even with the guilty plea.

In addition to just sending spam, he committed fraud and illegally brought various prescription drugs into the country for sale online. The drugs were offered for sale without the need of a doctor's prescription.

The FTC had collected nearly a half-million emails apparently sent as part of the campaigns run by Lin and his associates.

Lin inadvertently brought attention to himself by using hives of hacked computers known as "botnets" to send spam on his behalf. Perhaps without his knowledge, some of the compromised PCs belonged to military contractors. By hijacking them, he was effectively hacking the military. Many old-school hackers will tell you that messing with a private company is one thing, but as soon as you stick your nose in the government's business, you are asking for serious trouble.

Botnets offer many advantages to spammers over sending email from their own systems. They in effect, let them secure as much bandwidth and computing power as they need at the appealing cost of nothing. Because the messages often don't originate from the same network, they can be difficult for spam filtering systems to detect and eliminate spam. The sheer volume of spam also helps make up for any messages that are blocked.

Sometimes instead of establishing their own botnets, spammers will rent use of them from their controllers. In either situation, someone is having service stolen from them.

Botnets may continue to rise in popularity with spammers if certain kinds of, "electronic postage" style efforts to block junk mail are adopted. Some of the proposed standards require the sender solve a difficult mathematical equation in order to have their email received. This approach could be to a certain extent defeated by someone who had access to a massive amount of computing power, such as that provided by a botnet.

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