November 25, 2009 2:08PM  |
Spam king Alan Ralsky has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for fraud and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. The Department of Justice said Ralsky’s spam was difficult to trace, and a Cisco researcher said Ralsky was one of the first to use botnets. Progress is being made against spam, with traffic down this year from 2008.
 One of the world’s most notorious spammers has reached the end of the road — or at least a rest stop — that could last for the next 51 months. Alan Ralsky, known as the spam king, was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in prison by U.S. District Judge Marianne O. Battani in Detroit. In June, Ralsky pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud, and to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.The case against Ralsky and a number of other defendants was brought mostly in the Eastern District of Michigan. The scheme focused on using spam to promote stocks for U.S. companies owned and controlled by people in Hong Kong and China, the U.S. Department of Justice said. The indictment focused on the period from January 2004 to September 2005. The e-mails, according to the DOJ, contained false or misleading information and were sent via software that made it difficult to trace. Various strategies — including falsified headers, proxy computers (i.e. botnets), and falsely registered domain names — were used to evade antispam software and entice recipients to read the bogus messages.
Henry Stern, senior security researcher at Cisco, applauded the sentencing. “My understanding of all the evidence that I’ve seen over the past number of years is that Mr. Ralsky is one of the founding fathers of modern spam,” he said. Ralsky’s main innovation , according to Stern, significantly worsened the problem. “He was one of the first persons who used botnets for spam,” Stern said. “That is going away from using their own hardware to using people’s computers that are compromised with viruses. That was a big change in spamming, taking it from small scale to the spiraling snowball we have now, the massive spam volumes.” Mike Murray, chief information security officer for Foreground Security, said jailing Ralsky is a good thing, but the impact will be limited. “It’s kind of like cockroaches,” he said. “You kill one and two more take their place. [But] it’s great to put this guy away, and it’s great to see that there are some teeth behind CAN-SPAM and that we’re seeing some action.”
The good news, Stern said, is that progress is being made against spammers. “In the past year we have given them a number of setbacks and demonstrated that we have the ability, with the right amount of effort, to strike serious blows against spammers,” he said. “We measured that spam coming out of the U.S. averaged over the entire year has gone down about 20 percent compared to last year. That proves antispam and antibotnet efforts in the U.S. can be successful. We need to keep up the fight.” Murray agreed the tide is moving in the right direction. “We’re making progress,” he said. “The real progress is on the client side and raising the expense to spammers. Spam was essentially free in 1999. Now they have to pay for botnets [and other tools]. By raising their expense, we make spam less profitable. By making it less profitable, you make it less of a problem.” |
