By John Leyden for The Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
Public enemy number one is a Ukrainian known variously as Alex
or Alexey, a prolific user of botnets, networks of PCs compromised
with malware, to send out junk mail in association with a Russian
spam gang called Pavka/Artofit. Alexey is involved in distributing
child porn spam, among the many types of unsolicited junk he spew
onto the net every day.
The world's second worst spammer, according to Spamhaus, is Leo
Kuvayev, who also works with Pavka/Artofit. Kuvayev was fined $37m
for his anti-social activities by a Massachusetts court in October
2005. His present whereabouts are unknown.
Spamhaus's number three offender, Michael Lindsay of iMedia
Networks, runs a spam-hosting operation in the US that's used by
numerous other junk mail firms. Down at number eight on the list,
but well-known to law enforcement agencies is Western Europe, is
Alexey Panov, an author of software used to send spam from
compromised PCs and something of a Baron Samedi of botnets.
Four of the world's most prolific spammers in Spamhaus's
Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database are from Russia
and two are from the US. The other four members of the rogue's
gallery are from Canada, Hong Kong, Israel and the Ukraine. Between
them they push out a huge volume of junk mails touting porn, penis
pills, loans, stock scams and other assorted tat.
Much of the problem from spam stems from ineffective enforcement
action by ISPs. A small number of large ISPs go even further by
knowingly selling services to professional spammers, or doing
nothing to prevent spammers operating from their networks through
either corporate greed or mismanagement.
Although all networks claim to be anti-spam, some can't resist
the lure of selling services at a premium to spam operations.
Others simply decide that purging botnet-infected machines from
their network is too costly. Spamhaus names and shames the networks
it reports as having the world's worst spam problems. Worst of the
lot is verizonbusiness with serverflo.com and sbc.com picking up
the second and three places, respectively, in Spamhaus' list of
shame.
Spamhaus also uses its spam blocklist database to pick out the
countries that have become a "safe haven" for spam operations. As
with a similar list compiled by net security firm Sophos, the US
and China top the pile. Russia is behind Japan in fourth spot with
the UK occupying the seventh berth.
© The Register
2006
