Beware of making bad decisions on stale data

> This stopped happening a couple years ago :) It was a big problem. Now the
> spam is either from Internet biz newbies or people in unregulated
> countries like Nigeria.

It stopped happening for you because it sounds like you or your ISP have good filters. Large companies like Kraft/Gevalia Coffee have turned to spammers for more business, trying to achieve a "plausible deniability". And they're getting sued. http://legal.hypertouch.com/

Millions of idiots still buy pills, refinance, and fake college degrees.

http://www.sophos.com/spaminfo/articles/masssuit.html

Newbies are easy to catch and educate. Nigerians are easy to filter. The top 200 ROKSO-class spammers are still a huge problem at the ISP level.

> 10 years ago there were no spam laws. Why would you listen to scammers
> like AOL anyway?

Because AOL takes spammers to court and is quite effective. Also Microsoft.

> AOL claims that they can justify charging you a chunk of
> change every month to reduce the quality of the graphics you get, and oh
> yeah, they can justify the expense of the three dozen or so AOL CDs I've
> received in the mail and used as coasters and thrown away.

As they say, "friends don't let friends use AOL." :-)

> I agree that AOL wastes tons of money. I'd estimate the waste at 50%
> because their retail price is at least 50% more than their service is
> worth.

Then they may be a scam, which we've just discussed in another thread. :-)

But they sue spammers, so part of them (their legal team) is OK in my book.

> Ok, I'll just blacklist all of the spammers in the USA, then drive them to
> China. Then I'll blacklist all the billion people in China. I know exactly
> which button to push on my secret control panel.

All the country-based and rogue-network blacklists you would ever need can be found at http://www.blackholes.us/

You need to be running your own mail server, or a user-based filter like SpamPal, to use these lists. But they work. If you don't have customers or friends in Argentina for instance, you can filter them and not look back.

> Spammers are more criminal today than in the early days when their main
> desire was to flood servers to the point that they stopped functioning?

Yes. Much more. The early spammers that flooded servers were dumb. A good parasite never kills the host it's in.

Custom-written virus payloads and proxy abuse are specifically criminalized in the CAN-SPAM law, although trespass to chattels has been used as a charge against spammers for ten years.

> No, I think most spammers today are newbies who want to get out of
> poverty.

Perhaps by the numbers of spammers. Not by the numbers of emails sent. No more than 5% of the spam I see in my filters comes from MLM or other sorts of newbies. At the ISP level, it's almost all the pharma, XXX, mortgage, fake watches, etc. professionals. If you lurk for any time in the spammer forums such as specialham.com (when it's up, that is) you can see what they get recruited to spam for.

> From my experience, most viruses today are fairly harmless Java spyware,
> unless you're talking about the viruses that routinely arrive in my inbox
> after having been detected by three levels of anti-virus software.

You're clued in, and aren't likely to get infected. Aunt Tillie, who is running a DSL or cable modem with no AV and no firewall and still on WinXP SP1, is likely already infected. Once infected, even if a nice nephew installs AV - the virus has already made sure it will be ineffective against the installed payload.

The insidious virus payloads that were commissioned by big time spammers, are email relays. Then the spammer uses them to send a few emails per hour, which slows down the victim's computer so little that they don't even notice. Spyware and keystroke loggers might bog down a system to the point of unusability, but that's counterproductive for spammers, who are trying to remain undetected. A good parasite not only refrains from taking down the host, but tries to not even annoy the host. They live longer that way.

> Are you talking about remote control trojans like Back Orifice and NetBus?

Nope. Old threat. MyDoom, Sobig, and more recent ones. The new ones get installed by the Aunt Tillies of the world, phone home to the zombie master using some high port number, that rotates through various ports so a traffic sniffer might not see the packets, and sends some encrypted packets to get its instructions. The victim gets copies of the spam to send out over the next few hours, a list of addresses, and even updates and patches to the email engine. Remote administration, even. And when the victim sends out 10-20 emails an hour, their ISP doesn't even notice it against the background noise.

But when the spammer owns a million such CPUs, they can send out millions of spam per hour from the distributed network.

Old news:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/02/17/spam.zombies.ap/
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2125683/huge-increase-virus-infected-spam

> That's what it would take to make my computer a zombie. I think I'll know
> when that happens to me, and fortunately I make backups of all my data in
> case I need to reformat my hard drives.

Great. Clued in people sometimes get infected, but not usually.

> Ok, I'll agree that there are probably 75,000 computers on earth that are
> overrun with viruses in any given day. But the people who own those
> computers don't know about security. So what can I do about that?

The 75,000 was from a clueless report. I've seen articles that claim there are 100,000 more infected CPUs every month, but can't find the reference right now.

There's a difference between our writing styles. I can give references - you're guessing. Please keep up.

A recent article on the evolving threat:
http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=156

> You're wasting your money. Few computers have a fixed IP address. A
> computer's IP address is based on the MAC address contained in the
> ethernet card as negotiated with the nearest DHCP server. I'll sell you my
> IP address for whatever amount you want. Email me those pennies.

What are you smoking? Cable and DSL connections are long term leases, and rarely change, especially if the connection is always held on by the CPU.

And given the nature of the spam engines contained in the zombie systems, the new owner needs to just contact them for a minute, send them the location of the zombiemaster system(s), and if the IP ever changes on the victim's CPU, it "phones home" to reconnect with its master. These guys aren't dumb. They don't target dialup connections - they need the broadband connections that have very slowly changing IPs.

> So GetResponse is now anti-spam? Good, so am I. Nice to meet you.