Weblogs: Spam

Spammers have no Ethics: Divide and Conquer

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

The newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email, the online meeting space of spam fighters and booted spammers seeking revenge, have a set of rules pertaining to spammers:

Rule 0: Spam is theft
Rule 1: Spammers lie
Rule 2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see rule 1.
Rule 3: Spammers are stupid
Rule 4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt

Ethics

Rule 0 and 1 reinforce the position that spammers have no ethics. Spamhaus' ROKSO also documents most of the spammers have convictions ranging from breaking and entering through to theft and fraud (do a ROKSO search for criminal). So what we really have is a collection of ethic-less convicts.

Ethics is a professional attitude, a "set of principles of right conduct". So when someone asks to be removed from a mailing list, they are removed from all mailing lists, not spammed more and sold on as "confirmed live email addresses". Faking from email addresses and hijacking open relays also aren't ethical practices. Breaking into innocent user's systems to install zombie mail servers using worms isn't the practice of ethical people.

So, with a complete degree of obviousness, spammers have no ethics. They don't respect the rights of others. Many will happily sell off their grandmothers for any chance of cash...

Irresistable temptation

Microsoft have recently announced a $250,000 bounty on information about the virus writers behind MSBlast and SoBig. Considering there's good reason to believe spammers were behind, or at least investing in, the SoBig "install a zombie open proxy mail server on millions of PCs", and considering the rather low degree of ethics of the hard-core spammer, we'll probably see a lot of back-stabbing as spammers race each other to this bounty. (Of course, spammers snitching on their "business partners" is already a known event).

Talk about turning the vile habits of spammers against each other. It is one of the main strategies of modern warfare - divide and conquer. Internal fighting and interdiction is just a nice juicy bonus.

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