Comments on: U.S. leads the dirty dozen spammers

A big slice of the global spam sent this year had its origins in the United States, security researchers say.

[Dachi]

CAN-SPAM is weak.

If a spammer uses a hacked PC to send mail, he should be charged not just for spam but for his involvement in hacking the PC. This would be very similar to the existing legislation on "possession of stolen goods".

Working for an ISP, I have located these hacked PC's, and seen traffic signatures from the system uploading word lists to them. What I have learned from the traffic signatures is that they either use the same software, or the spammers share a lot of code. I have observed advancements in the SMTP engines used on these PC's over the past year or so.

I don't work in abuse, but I wonder how hard would it be to set up a honeypot and seek damages from these spammers? Is this information readily available for ISP's?

[My-Self]

Can Spam is aptly named and strong ...

It's a strongly pro-spam law, it's terms were negociated with the DMA to prevent harming the spammy activities of their members !

At this point, my bet would be with offensive tools similar to Lycos's first attempt (MakeLoveNotSpam) that was downloaded by more than 100000 people in just a few days. Such massive DDOS tools have the potential to coerce spam friendly website providers (or their upstreams) do stop their business relationship with their spammy customers. I eagerly await for more destructive alternatives to appear, and if it slows down traffic from China and Florida, so be it !

[Al Johnsons]

damages from these spammers

http://www.analogstereo.com/kia_magentis_owners_manual.htm