Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Japan Brings Down Godzilla of Spam

Via The Register -

Japanese police have arrested a "prolific spammer" who allegedly bombarded inboxes with hundreds of millions of messages punting internet gambling and dating sites.

Investigators reckon Yuki Shiina, 25, sent as many as 2.2 billion spam messages using what appears to be rudimentary spamming techniques. He allegedly purchased a list of 600,000 email addresses for a pricey ¥100,000 ($927), earning ¥2m ($18,540) through a subsequent spamming campaign, security vendor Sophos reports.

Shiina reportedly faked the message headers of junk mail he sent in a bid to avoid detection, an offence against local anti-spam laws. There's no mention of the use of compromised machines to send spam - standard practice for junk mail scumbags over recent years, and a powerful technique to frustrate both basic spam blocking and investigatory techniques.

Complaints from a local ISP over the volume of junk mail it was processing resulted in an investigation that led onto Shiina's arrest by Tokyo's finest.

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