This just in from SpamSuite: Sindeelou Thomson has sued US Representative John Doolittle for sending her unwanted spam. [Channel 13, Sacremento story].

Given that the CAN-SPAM act specifically legalizes political spam, I don’t think this will get a lot of traction. In this particular case, however, she’s suing under the California anti-spam law which is somewhat tougher than CAN-SPAM. This may be worth watching.
Read More… (From The Spam Diaries)

This post has been withdrawn due to objections from Virtumundo’s lawyers.Other comments on this order:

• Mickey Chandler’s Spam Suite
• Al Iverson’s Spam Resource

You can find a copy of the judge’s order at:http://www.spamsuite.com/webfm_send/126
Read More… (From E-mail, tech policy and more )

“The Court finds that Plaintiffs’ instant lawsuit is an excellent example of the ill-motivated, unreasonable, and frivolous type of lawsuit that justifies an award of attorneys’ fees to Defendants”

Gordon v. Virtumundo , 06-0204-JCC I believe this ruling represents the first time that a CAN-SPAM plaintiff has been ordered to pay attorneys’ fees and costs to a defendant. via Technology & Marketing Law Blog
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

Ok, you can substitute whatever agency name you want, but the story is nearly always the same. A little while ago I blogged about Advanced TDS, another Mpack-type clone and mentioned how professional some of the malware creators are becoming.At the other end of the spectrum, we still have a large number of amateurs in the game. The attempts that some of them make in their social engineering trickery is abysmal, to say the least. Take this example of a spam email:

Dear Mr./Mrs. D####### P#######This email was sent to inform you that your complaint case #278250765 filled with the FTC was successfully registered and posted in our Business Sentinel, a business complaint database maintained by the U. S. Federal Trade Commission. The complaint that you have filled is now accessible to certified government law enforcement and regulatory agencies in ICPEN-member countries. Government agencies may use this information to investigate suspect companies and individuals, uncover new scams, and spot other such illegal activities.Because the Internet marketplace is a borderless one, sharing your complaint with government agencies in different countries will help keep the Internet safe. It will also help prevent others from experiencing the problem you have.Information submitted through the online complaint form may also be used in aggregate form to analyze and create statistics, that may be released to the public. This aggregate data will not contain any personal information.Attached you will find a copy of your complaint. Please print a hard copy of the complaint for your records in the upcoming investigation.Thank you for your cooperation and we will keep you informed on the status of our investigation.Federal Trade Commission

It”s not a bad attempt at story writing; the message and wording sound reasonably convincing. The usual story is about a complaint received by the government agency mentioned. Also as usual, attached to the email is a document name along the lines of Complaint_[several random digits].doc. If the receiver falls for the trick and opens the document, they will see the following in the document.
View of opened Word docIf, at this point, alarm bells have not started to go off, then I”m afraid to say you have missed some very clear telltale signs that something is amissFirst there is the schoolboy error in the first word, which would suggest that the author is not from a professional organization. I doubt the scam email crafter meant to say, SBellow is a copy of your original complaint. So, null points for the scammers on the language skills test.Aside from the incorrect choice of words, what about the rest of the document? You”ve got to ask yourself, is a government agency likely to send something of this nature and quality? I would like to think that our taxpayer dollars would give us civil servants able to produce better quality output than this example. So this scam also fails the quality test.Then there is the strange method of embedding a PDF inside a Word document. Now why would anybody want to do that? Why not just send the PDF on its own? Because, as it turns out, what appears to be a PDF file is actually an executable file.Should you try to open the embedded file, you are still given one more chance to avoid being infected.
Prompt after attempt to open PDFWindows warns you that a program called C_Adobe.exe is about to be run. Once again there are clues to be picked up here. Why would a program called C_Adobe.exe run when you attempt to open a PDF file? Plus, C_Adobe.exe does not look like a legitimate application. And, of course, it”s not. It is actually a downloader program that attempts to download other files. The downloaded file drops another file which is an information stealing Trojan horse. Had you clicked on the Run button, I”m afraid you would have just invited a number of threats onto your computer. For most of us, common sense will have saved us from making this mistake. Even better though, a Symantec security product would have caught the whole thing at the very beginning.

Read More… (From Security Response Weblog)

JP/J. Adiguna I love this kind of stuff, and wish these kinds of initiatives got better support from government, NGOs and companies: Harun checks the blood pressure and weight of a customer in a park in Menteng, Central Jakarta, on…
Read More… (From loose wire blog)

Published: Monday, July 23 2007 @ 10:14 PM CDT Contributed by: Tommy Over 150 million U.S. citizens are connected to the Internet. via LinuxElectrons
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

THE FBI has revealed that it has 70 active investigations into spam-related crimes. Talking to the FTC’s Spam Summit in Washington, the DOJ and FBI said that the public could expect more prosecutions from spam and botnet activities in the coming months.
Read More… (From Spam News)

“Our SWAT team is ready to respond on a moment’s notice but we did not have a vehicle to transport the team”

No, the government is not after you. That’s what the U.S. Department of Justice is saying about e-mail messages some people have reported receiving from the agency. via Gainesville.com
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

This has been making the rounds in the blogosphere these past few days: Vonage is taking months/years old addresses, submitted ONLY for a forward-to-a-friend promotion, and sending advertising to those people years later.

If true, it violates all best practice guidelines for appropriate email marketing.

If true, it’s questionably legal.

The worst/best part is that the emails Vonage sent claim to be new referrals, saying “Andy Sernowitz asked us to tell you…” even though Andy Sernowitz apparently hasn’t asked Vonage to do this in many, many months.

Psst, Vonage? Ever heard of Jumpstart? If not, I suspect you will be learning more about that particular FTC action soon enough.
Read More… (From Al Iverson’s Spam Resource)

The US Department of Justice has issued a warning to the public urging them not to respond to a bogus email that purports to be from the DoJ. via The Register
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

Pesky phishers impersonate keepers of JusticeThe US Department of Justice has issued a warning to the public urging them not to respond to a bogus email that purports to be from the DoJ.Original post by Dougal and a wordpress plugin by Elliott
Read More… (From The War on Spam)

Pesky phishers impersonate keepers of Justice

The US Department of Justice has issued a warning to the public urging them not to respond to a bogus email that purports to be from the DoJ.
Read More… (From The Register - Security: Spam)

Many people don’t know but the Federal Register is the government publication where you can actually find and comment on the laws, regulations and rules that affects each one of us in all we do. It’s interesting to read the…
Read More… (From Spam, Anti-Spam, and LashBack…)

We are encouraging everyone to attend the July 11-12th FTC SPAM Summit Workshop in Washington, DC at the FTC Conference Center. Read LashBack’s official public comment: The Next Generation of Solutions When the CAN-SPAM Act took effect on January 1,…
Read More… (From Spam, Anti-Spam, and LashBack…)

Participants at the Counter e-Crime Operations Summit called for measures to protect against botnets, including government funded computer clinics to treat infections, ingress filtering and even ‘Internet driver’s licenses’ for users.
Read More… (From Spam News)

Canned by CAN-SPAMTwo men who ran a spam operation to promote pornographic websites had the book thrown at them today. A federal jury in Phoenix, Arizona convicted Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California and James Schaffer, 41 of Paradise Valley, Arizona of eight counts, including conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and transportation of obscene materials.Original post […]
Read More… (From The War on Spam)

In the words of the Ghost Busters, SWe”ve got one We”ve got what?, I hear you ask. We now have an example of alleged SMS spam with some real statistics rather than the usual conjecture. We know SMS spam has been growing through the monitoring of such sites as Grumble Text [1] however we”ve never had true insight into the scale of a professional SMS spamming operation. Well recently that changed - TelecomWeb broke the story [2] that,

SVerizon Wireless filed a lawsuit against Nev.-based I-VEST Global Corporation and various “John Does,” alleging they sent unsolicited commercial electronic messages (wireless spam) to its customers. and that SThe lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Trenton, N.J., alleges that, beginning in April, I-VEST attempted to send more than 12 million text messages to Verizon Wireless handsets, offering information about buying stocks or real estate. However, the carrier says spam filtering and network monitoring actions it took prevented the vast majority of “the messages from getting through to subscribers’ handsets and resulted in fewer than 5,000 messages being delivered.”

So this shows us that the attempt was of a reasonable size, and that the anti-spam and network monitoring tools in place allowed them to either automatically block or react in a timely fashion to block the spam run.What about the court documents? Well the court documents are available on Pacer [3] and, while the first provides details of the complaint [4], both actually provide some examples of the SMS spam allegedly sent [4] [5 Exhibit A].From reading the court documents, some interesting things emerge. The first is that in the first document, [4] point 27, Verizon mention that they had to develop and purchase systems in order to combat the defendant”s Spam operation. Point 28 describes the strain that the attack placed on the Verizon SMSC and associated infrastructure.Anyway, a fascinating insight into the scale and the ramifications of SMS spam on operators.A short note to thank Khoi Nguyen and Eric Chien of Symantec, for bringing the information to my attention and finding the court documents, respectively.[1] http://www.grumbletext.co.uk/
[2] http://www.telecomweb.com/tnd/23581.html
[3] http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/
[4] Verizon1.pdf
[5] Verizon2.pdf

Read More… (From Security Response Weblog)