NEWS

The Spam Fighting Community is under Attack from Spammers for most of the summer.

Which began in midsummer and have increased steadily in the intervening weeks, forced Joe Jared, who had been hosting the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, also known as SPEWS, at his Osirusoft.com Web site, to suddenly pull the plug Tuesday on the popular but controversial block list. “I had to shut it down to protect my livelihood,” said Jared, who also runs a small business selling shoe inserts on the Web site. “I was getting hammered with up to 1,000 megabytes (of data) per second.”

Other block lists, which are used by Internet service providers and businesses to filter out the majority of incoming spam before it reaches the end users, have come under siege from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks this summer. The bombardment of massive amounts of data has intermittently prevented subscribers or users from gaining access to lists at Web sites of SpamCop.net, Spamhaus.org, Monkeys.com and the Spam & Open Relay Blocking System.

This is a sure sign that the spammers are starting to feel the heat! They are now resorting to using any means they can to disrupt operations of Spam Fighting Organizations. It is time that the Federal government become involved and the FBI start Investigating and putting a stop to these attacks. It is odd that when Microsoft and Ebay along with Yahoo and a few others get slammed the FBI is at their front door the next day. I would think they should treat the attacks that are going on now in the same light. Regardless it is Illegal Activity that they are using to disrupt operations.

Portions of this report are derived from the MSNBC Web site.

Membership Features


• To work with other investigators investigating spammers.
• Access to tools to help you in your investigations.
• Work on projects with others as a team.
• Access to the NATSMA Forums.
• Ability to have an equal voice in the progress of an investigation.
• An Option to receive a monthly news letter with progress reports of ongoing Investigations.

Italy Goes Opt-in, Law States Senders of Unsolicited Bulk Email Now Face Jail

Spamming is now a crime in Italy. The first of the European countries to implement the EU Anti-Spam Directive banning the sending of Unsolicited Bulk Email (the rest of Europe is implementing the law by 31 October), Italy has implemented the EU E-Privacy Directive 2002/58/EC ahead of the prescribed October 2003 deadline.

The Italian Privacy Authority published the official legal notice yesterday at http://www.garanteprivacy.it/garante/doc.jsp?ID=272444 under the heading "Spamming for profit is now a crime", stating "Those who send email advertisements without the consent of the address owners will go to jail".

The Italian law states (in brief):

- The sending of Unsolicited Bulk Email is now forbidden by law.

- If done for profit purposes, the senders face fines up to 90,000 euros, and may be sent to jail.

- Email addresses cannot be used for promotional mailings without consent, no matter where and how they were collected.

- There is no such a thing as a 'public email address' in the usual sense of the word 'public', i.e: all email addresses are private.

- forgeries are not allowed.

- Those who purchase address lists _must_ verify that each and every address in the list gave consent (that is, responsibility cannot be discharged on the list seller, ever).

NATSMA is an Investigation team to help limit the amount of spam we see in our Inbox each day. Spam is more prolific than it was a year ago and could destroy the Email system as we know it. So report spam and get involved in the fight today.