Spammers Hacks Website for Addresses

A man who apparently sent over 1,000,000 spam messages has been arrested. His crime may not have been the spamming itself, but how he got the email addresses and he's behavior after the fact. The initial investigation indicates he may have hacked into a website's mailing list to locate his victims. He also may have engaged in extortion.

The 18 year old made thousands of bogus profiles on a popular free forum site. The site also offers chat and email access for users. He then used the accounts to send the unwanted email to other members.

Frequently online services will have different anti-spam policies that come into play when messages are sent between members. Commonly such emails are ignored by spam filters and automatically categorized as being legitimate.

The website has since spent several thousand dollars deploying new spam email software to help assure a similar attack doesn't happen again. Deploying a server-side filtering can substantially reduce the amount of junk messages users receive. Commonly this type of software uses real-time blacklists to help prevent spam email.

Confusingly, it appears he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. He subsequently requested that the site grant him exclusive access to its members for the purpose of sending spam.

After being blown-off by the site, he threatened to let other spammers know about his techniques. Nice job, idiot. Threatening extortion is a great way to get the police involved.

At this point it would appear the CAN-SPAM act or other new laws specifically aimed at stopping spam did not come into play. The article doesn't site specifically which laws he's accused of violating.

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