Blog spammer tracked to Austria

(Via Spam Huntress). Blogger Peter Forret tracks down a spammer who hit his blog with over 2600 posts. Read his story in Meet Mark Hostetler, spammer from Austria; this article could serve as a tutorial on tracking spammers.

To summarize: The spams all pointed to domains registered in Belgium. A check of the .be whois database showed them to be registered to "Pikod Darek" of Poland. The sites themselves are hosted by spam-friendly isp The Planet. The sites are simple redirectors which send the user to http://www.find.fm/?aid=4077, which in turn is owned by Mark Hostetler who also owns Cashwebsearch.com and Peakclick.com.