Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Fighting spammers

If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture.

First, a word of comfort: it's not just you. Your friends have not been talking about you. There is not a hidden camera in your bedroom.

Your email box may be stuffed with offers to make the male regenerative organ larger, but it's nothing personal. Everyone in the world with an email account has been offered a larger penis at some point. Even women. And,more worryingly, children.

The person sending the email does not know anything about its recipients because it's being sent to millions of people. Spam (mass unsolicited email) now accounts for half of all email. And a recent study by Symantec, an internet security firm, found that 80 per cent of children get adult-oriented spam - offering them drugs, dating services and financial offers along the lines of "send me your life savings and I'll give you millions of dollars. Honest."

And of course, there's the sexual spam. I get it by the bucketload. I get dozens of messages each day offering me "intimate enhancement", cures for impotence, Russians brides and, bizarrely, cheap printer ink cartridges.

This doesn't happen because I spend my time trawling dodgy sites looking for Slavic ladies with a thing for office supplies. I get so much spam because my email addresses regularly appears on the web.

Top tip: It's all a con. And if you fall for it A) you're an idiot and B) you're encouraging more spam.

Spammers use automatic programs called bots to crawl across the internet looking for emails. When they find one they pass it back to the spammer and he or she sends you his junk mail.

There is a way to defeat this. If you post your email on the web don’t write it like this: skirpatrick@scotsman.com, write it in words (skirkpatrick at scotsman dot com). The bots are looking for the magic "@" sign and don't understand "at".

Most people fight spam by ignoring it. However, it's getting harder to do this as a lot of spam tries to look like legitimate messages. Thus it is that you open an email like "Re: that thing you asked me" and find yourself faced with lurid text promising significant increases in length and firmness - usually when you're talking to your boss, mother or a party of vicars being shown round the office.

Top tip: If you open such an email and see an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom saying something like "click here to stop receiving emails like this", ignore it. All that will happen is that the spammer will be notified that your email address is used regularly and he or she will then sell it on to others. For this reason you should never reply to spam. In the rare event of your message getting through, you will only succeed in verifying that your email account is active.

Along with everyone else in the world, I've had enough of this. When I got my latest tranche of spam I decided to track down the person responsible.

A minor character from the Mystery of Edwin Drood was offering me girth-increasing unguents

I chose a message that purported to come from "Gertrude Godwin" because the name sounded like one of Dickens's less successful heroines. I was intrigued to find out why a minor character from the Mystery of Edwin Drood was offering me girth-increasing unguents.

I went to the site named in the email. I did a "whois" search on the URL (web address) through DNSstuff.com. This provided me with contact details for the person who owned that address. They appeared to be based in Mexico, but the information looked like it might be bogus. Lo and behold, the email address turned out to be false.

I then did a "traceroute" search on the URL, which showed me the connections that led my PC to the site. I followed this up with a whois search on the last IP address (a string of numbers that identifies a computer) in the list. This gave me the name and address of an internet service provider in Pakistan.

However, just because the trail ended with that ISP, it did not mean that I had found "Gertrude". The original spammer was probably just routing his or her stuff through that ISP. I still had no concrete information on who they were.

At this point I realised I was floundering around and should stick to watching how the expert anti-spammers do it.

The first to catch my eye was Francis Uy. He successfully traced down a spammer and posted the man's name, address and contact details on a website - a practice that is becoming increasingly popular.

The spammer, George Alan Moore Jr, then sued, claiming that as a result he had received numerous threatening phone calls and hundreds of unsolicited magazines and catalogues.

Needless to say, his case was thrown out. But he did succeed in making himself very well known and now Mr Moore's contact details are very popular on the internet. This comment from a visitor to geek.com is typical: "Don't anyone harass this guy: Maryland Internet Marketing LLC, George Alan Moore Jr, 300 Twin Oaks Rd, Linthicum MD, 21090-2154, 877-655-3438, 410-963-8226. Clearly he has suffered enough already at the hands of that cruel, cruel Francis Uy!"

Another anti-spammer trick is particularly fiendish. Spammers' email addresses are tracked and then collated on a website like Spamerang.net. Remember I mentioned that the spammers use bots to search for email addresses on the web? When they search Spamerang they pick up all those lovely email addresses and add them to spam lists. The spammers then spam each other.

But the anti-spam crown goes to "Man in the wilderness". His site, belps.freewebsites.com was being used by a spammer to mask her activities. He asked her to stop. She didn't.

"Man in the wilderness" is a computer security consultant, which means he knows a lot about hacking.

He not only found the spammer, he hacked into her PC. He got a screenshot of her forging his domain. And he went through it with a fine-tooth comb digging out all sorts of personal information, secrets and details of scams. He discovered that the spammer had accomplices so he did the same to them.

He then anonymously turned over all the information to the authorities and posted it on his site.

He even found a topless picture of the main spammer that she had stored on her hard drive. It's online too.

Of course, this kind of hacking is illegal, but then again so is flaying spammers alive and dousing them with lemon juice - and I don't think we should rule out any punishment for these scumbags.

Christopher Caldwell had an interesting piece on spam in last week's Weekly Standard. One of his solutions is that e-mail would cost 1 cent per e-mail with the first 5,000 per year being free. This means that e-mails would still be free for most people, but spammers, who send out milllions of e-mails per day, would find the costs prohibitive thus putting them out of business.
It's not a bad idea.

"Man in the wilderness" is a computer security consultant, which means he knows a lot about hacking.

A fine gentleman. I've corresponded with him, and he hates spam even more than I do (if that is possible). What he did to spammer/scammer Rodona Garst should be chronicled at the Smithsonian.

Here's how to put a dent in this garbage, sometimes it stops it all together... first get this:

MailWasher
MailWasher Free Mailwasher free (2.0.40) has just been released. ... Otherwise,
use MailWasher for free. If you register MailWasher: ...
Description: Filters e-mail before downloading to attempt to remove viruses and junk e-mail.
Category: Computers > Software > ... > Mail > Windows > Tools > Anti Spam
www.mailwasher.net/ - 22k - Jun 24, 2003 - Cached - Similar pages

...you can use it to delete emails on the server so it never gets to yout PC. It will also blacklist and bounce email, and it's is easier to use and read than Outlook Express's.

It also has a "view full header"-- using that, copy the header info ( you want the quadrette numbers of every server the email has passed through in the chain of servers- sometimes one, sometimes many) over to a new email... then copy the quadrett numbers one at a time to the lookup here:

-http://www.all-nettools.com/tools1.htm--

Find the webmaster emails there, copy them to the new email with a subject line like "Spam header info follows" and fire it off.

You will see a lot less after doing this a few times.

Allnettools is also useful for tracing malicious emails and viruses.

"He not only found the spammer, he hacked into her PC. He got a screenshot of her forging his domain. And he went through it with a fine-tooth comb digging out all sorts of personal information, secrets and details of scams. He discovered that the spammer had accomplices so he did the same to them.

He then anonymously turned over all the information to the authorities and posted it on his site.

He even found a topless picture of the main spammer that she had stored on her hard drive. It's online too. "

Bless you.

From his website (excerpt):

May 24, 2000

In the first half of the year 2000, a spammer began forging my domain name in the return address and headers of her spam sends. The domain forging resulted in thousands of undeliverable emails flying back at my mail server, and the possible blocking of my domain by other mail server administrators. I countered by having the Internet account used to send the spam cancelled. For the spammer responsible this was warning shot number one.

The spammer came back on-line through another ISP and continued to forge my domain in her spam messages. I responded by having her second Internet account cancelled;. this was warning shot number two. The spammer came back on the Internet through an AOL dial-up and began forging my domain for a third time. Strike three - you're out.

Normally I am too busy to be bothered with the everyday activities of a small time huckster, but this one was beginning to piss me off. To top it off inexperienced anti-spammers were sending bitch mail to me for an offense I had nothing to do with. It was apparent that a slight deterrent was not going to be enough to alter this spammers behavior. It had become enough of an annoyance to warrant my attention....

It's a great story!

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