E360 sells affiliate status to other spammers — CONFIRMED
Just announced publicly on the net-abuse newsgroups: Some time ago, someone phoned Kelly Hale at E360 pretending to be someone being blocked by Spamhaus and answering E360's ad for Spamhaus removal services. Hale explained in some detail how, for $7500 per block of IP addresses, E360 would force Spamhaus to stop listing the caller's addresses by claiming that the caller is an affiliate of E360.
Hale explained at some length as to how it would be done, leveraging off of their previous lawsuit against Spamhaus (which they won by default when Spamhaus failed to show up, claiming lack of jurisdiction). Hale also offered quantity discounts if the caller wanted to unlist more than a "C" block (256 addresses) of IP space.
An advertising brochure for E360's service offers three options: The first is called "IP Identity Management" and involves modifying the Arin (master registry of all IP blocks) database so make spammer IP addresses look like they belong to E360. This is the service we knew E360 was offering.
The second service they offer is IP Tunneling. In a nutshell, this allows spammer email servers to connect to the internet over a virtual private network to E360's servers in order to hide the spammer's true IP addresses and make them appear to come from E360.
The third option is for the senders to pay E360 to send the spam for them.
A copy of the audio recording can temporarily be found at yousendit.com, along with copies of E360's brochures advertising the services [1], [2]. (Yousendit.com has a download limit, so these links won't work for very long, but I expect mirrors will appear shortly and will update this post as that happens.)
Anyway, very little of this comes as a surprise; it was pretty obvious that E360 was gaming the legal decision as a money-making scheme, having already sold affiliate status to Virtumundo at least, but this audio recording and these brochures are an undeniable smoking gun.
The only real questions that remain are: was this what they had in mind all along when they sued Spamhaus or did they only think of it later? And: how will the judge react when he sees and hears this?
Hale explained at some length as to how it would be done, leveraging off of their previous lawsuit against Spamhaus (which they won by default when Spamhaus failed to show up, claiming lack of jurisdiction). Hale also offered quantity discounts if the caller wanted to unlist more than a "C" block (256 addresses) of IP space.
An advertising brochure for E360's service offers three options: The first is called "IP Identity Management" and involves modifying the Arin (master registry of all IP blocks) database so make spammer IP addresses look like they belong to E360. This is the service we knew E360 was offering.
The second service they offer is IP Tunneling. In a nutshell, this allows spammer email servers to connect to the internet over a virtual private network to E360's servers in order to hide the spammer's true IP addresses and make them appear to come from E360.
The third option is for the senders to pay E360 to send the spam for them.
A copy of the audio recording can temporarily be found at yousendit.com, along with copies of E360's brochures advertising the services [1], [2]. (Yousendit.com has a download limit, so these links won't work for very long, but I expect mirrors will appear shortly and will update this post as that happens.)
Anyway, very little of this comes as a surprise; it was pretty obvious that E360 was gaming the legal decision as a money-making scheme, having already sold affiliate status to Virtumundo at least, but this audio recording and these brochures are an undeniable smoking gun.
The only real questions that remain are: was this what they had in mind all along when they sued Spamhaus or did they only think of it later? And: how will the judge react when he sees and hears this?
6:30 PM |
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1 Comments:
Wow! Its crazy the schemes compnaies put together to get ahead in the world. Great article, we need to see more stuff like this. The truth abouth what people are doing instead of the stories people make for them.
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