A Third of World's Spam From One Russian Man

DaveNJ1987 writes "The FBI believes that one third of the world's spam messages are being generated by one 23-year-old Russian man. Oleg Nikolaenko of Moscow is being blamed for operating the Mega D botnet that sent spam emails from over 500,000 infected computers."

Re:somebody should kill the bastard

[devbox]

Yes, lets forget about laws and giving sentences that are in line with the crime. No matter how you want to spin it, spamming clearly isn't as big crime as rape, violence or killing someone.

In fact, screw sentences and court. Let's just kill anyone that breaks laws.

Re:somebody should kill the bastard

[John Hasler]

> Apologies for stereotyping...

Apology not accepted.

> ...but you must be American...

Like the Canadian advisor to the PM who recently called for the murder of Julian Assange? Or the British police who attack Brazilian tourists in the subway and shoot them in the head?

> Civilized countries arrest someone, then try him.

And, not coincidentally, he has been arrested in the USA and will be tried.

Re:Hand me the lighter fluid...

[grcumb]

Who's ready for a good old fashioned lynching?

You guys go ahead. We're a little busy right now, coercing data services here in the US to stop spreading the truth about our diplomatic corps.

Best,

The US Govt.

Re:somebody should kill the bastard

[bsDaemon]

Email, on the server-side, is an io-bound process. That is, disk usage is a concern every bit as much as memory and bandwidth. I've seen spam kick loads on servers that would be running ~2-5 up to around a 15. Dropping the spammer in the firewall brought the load down almost immediately. I then had to remove all the mail they were pushing to us from the queue so I could force-deliver the legitimate mail, as the queue had become severely backed up, and mails that should have gone through right away had been backed up for several hours. The server had been in critical for CPU for several hours in nagios before I came in and fixed it because the people on the previous shift hadn't thought to check the mail queue, despite the fact the mail queue was also in critical on that server.

Spam is a plague like no other. It's a vector for phishing and infection and causes verifiable harm in and of itself.

so ?

[Tom]

So what are we waiting for? Someone shoot him.

Oh, I forgot. We live in an age where the general public is not something that anyone stands up for anymore. Our politicians are all bought, we ourselves are too lazy and scared, and most of what we have in NGOs has become a political quagmire of commercialized selling of "feel good".

Sending the same amount of traffic to an individual company would result in charges for a DOS attack, no questions asked. But no, as long as you have enough victims and only minor damage to each, nobody really cares very much.

Re:Wow

[dangitman]

The FBI believes that one third of the world's spam messages are being generated by one 23-year-old Russian man

Congratulations to Oleg Nikolaenko for achieving so much at such a young age!

Unfortunately, the article is inaccurate. He's not a man yet, he's only 23.

Re:somebody should kill the bastard

[digitalsushi]

Nope, it's not. Find someone who would rather be raped to deleting 500,000 messages from their inbox.

Re:somebody should kill the bastard

[interval1066]

"Civilized countries arrest someone, then try him. People are not guilty until proven guilty..."

You mean like a 9/11 plotter? Given posh digs in a tropical paradise, allowed access to all forms of media; allowed to pray in the manner he is accustomed, eating exactly as his religion dictates. then tried in a civilian court where a civil judge will find him not guilty of 99% of his war crimes because he was slapped around a little? Yeah, we should do more of that. Europeans are so wise. We should be more like them. Friggin' idiots.

Observe that his name anagrams to ...

[J. L. Tympanum]

Lego. Not sure if that is significant.

Re:somebody should kill the bastard

[JoshuaZ]

Yes, spamming is a massive crime, akin to murder. This person is responsible for a third of the world's spam. How much time does a person waste per a month on dealing with spam? Let's say you waste 10 minutes (which is probably a lower estimate). That means you waste about 2 hours on spam a year. If we apply that estimate to just a few Americans (say 30 million of them) then that means in the course of one year this person has wasted 20 million hours of peoples time. There are around 9000 hours in a year. That means he's wasted about 2000 years worth of time. So in a year he's deprived from lives the same amount as if he killed thirty infants. Now, that's a ridiculous underestimate since there are a lot more internet users than just 30 million Americans. If we instead estimated using 300 million which is still an underestimate for the combined population of US and Europe that has regular internet access, that means he's doing the equivalent to killing 300 infants a year. Part of the problem here is that humans are really, really bad at appreciating scale. Killing an actual human being feels very different primarily because humans didn't evolve in a context where it was possible for someone to be evil by harming lots of people a tiny bit. But the point should be clear: By any rough metric this person is equivalent to a mass murderer.