The Federal Trade Commission won a preliminary legal victory against what it called one of the largest spam gangs on the Internet, persuading a federal court in Chicago on Tuesday to freeze the group’s assets and order the spam network to shut down.
The group, was known among spam-fighting organizations as HerbalKing, sent billions of unsolicited messages to Internet users over the last 20 months, promoting replica watches and a variety of pharmaceuticals, including weight-loss drugs and herbal pills that supposedly enhanced the male anatomy, according to the commission.
“This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam,” said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam
To pepper Internet users with its solicitations, the HerbalKing group used a botnet, a global network of computers infected with malicious software, often without the knowledge of their owners.
The security firm Marshal Software, which assisted the F.T.C. with the investigation, estimated in court documents that the group’s Mega-D botnet — named after one of its pill products — was made up of 35,000 computers and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day. In January, the botnet was the leading source of spam on the Internet, the firm estimated.
F.T.C. investigators also said they monitored the group’s finances closely and that it cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone.
The commission has brought more than 100 cases against spammers and spyware vendors over the past decade. But officials and investigators said this spam operation was perhaps the most extensive they had ever encountered, with ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States.
“They were sending extraordinary amounts of spam,” said Jon Leibowitz, an F.T.C. commissioner. “We are hoping at some level that this will help make a small dent in the amount of spam coming into consumers’ in-boxes.”
The government is also pursuing criminal charges against the group. F.B.I. investigators in Chicago and St. Louis have executed search warrants against members of the spam gang, the commission said.
The activities of the HerbalKing group, like those of other criminal groups online, were remarkably international in scope. The group was shipping drugs like Propecia, Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft out of India. The F.T.C. also said the group based its Web sites in China, processed credit cards from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and Cyprus, and transferred funds among members using ePassporte, an electronic money network.
As part of its investigation, the commission purchased the “herbal” pills from the group and asked the Food and Drug Administration to test them. That agency found that the pills contained sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, which can be risky for some people with heart conditions.
WTF’s she doing? i don’t know :\
Antispam researchers lauded the crackdown and said it would send a strong message to other spammers. But they were not confident that spam volumes would decrease.
“This will send some real shock waves through the spamming industry, but even if these guys were running a substantial botnet of compromised computers, there are always spammers looking to take their place,” said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”
[from New York Times]
It’s a great effort to curb SPAMs, which fills your BLOCKED folder in your email account with lots of funny and weird emails.
However, i think it won’t really make a big difference as the emails will keep coming in and yeah, the spamming network is a little too extensive.
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