Via Krebs on Security, a russian named Pyotr Levashov has been arrested in Spain. According to news reports (NY Times, Reuters) the arrest happened in response to a warrant issued by the US, but no details were given as to what he was being charged with. The DoJ says the case is currently under seal and will not comment on charges. There is widespread agreement that this person is involved in...
Large companies (un?)knowingly hire spammers
This morning, CSO and MacKeeper published joint articles on a massive data leak from a marketing company. (Update: 2019: both articles are gone, a cached version of the CSOnline link is at ) This company, River City Media (RCM), failed to put a password on their online backups sometime. This leaked all of the company’s data out to the Internet at large. MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris...
ROKSO lawsuit settled
Earlier this year Ken Magill reported that a judge in the UK was allowing a libel case against Spamhaus to go forward. I thought for sure I’d blogged about the case at the time, but apparently I didn’t. The short version is that today Spamhaus announced the lawsuit was settled and the complainants paid for Spamhaus’ legal fees. As with most legal cases the details are complex...
ROKSO
ROKSO is the Register of Known Spamming Operations. It is a list of groups that have been disconnected from more than 3 different networks for spamming. ROKSO is a little bit different than most of the Spamhaus lists. The listings themselves talk more about the background of the listees and less about the specific emails that are the problem. Many ISPs and ESPs use ROKSO during customer vetting...
Spammer prosecuted in New Zealand
Today (well, actually tomorrow, but only because New Zealand is on the other side of the date line) the NZ Department of Internal Affairs added a 3rd statement of claim against Brendan Battles and IMG Marketing. This third claim brings the total possible fines to $2.1 million. Brendan is a long term spammer, who used to be in the US and moved to New Zealand in 2006. His presence in Auckland was...