A Third of World's Spam From One Russian Man 233
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."
Hand me the lighter fluid... (Score:2)
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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.
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In fact, if anything, Ive heard how embarrassing it is that the gov't's response has been so timid.
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Considering how the US conduct diplomacy, I think it's now spelled the "diplomatic corpse".
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Why be so uncivilized when Russia showed us the polonium way.
More Details and Background (Score:5, Informative)
From the article cited in the summary:
The botnet sends out millions of spam messages ...
You're a few orders of magnitude off there. Try tens of billions ...
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From the article cited in the summary:
The botnet sends out millions of spam messages ...
You're a few orders of magnitude off there. Try tens of billions ...
I'd say it has the wrong dimension altogether. Is that the number of messages per second, per year, per Planck time?
Re:More Details and Background (Score:5, Funny)
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In other news I noticed that one 10^-33-th of my spam is gone this morning.
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Maybe it's sending millions of spam messages per parsec?
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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If he can keep going, maybe he'll be able to send 8/3 of the world's spam messages by the age of 30!
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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.
Fake Rolexes and Fake Zoloft (Score:2)
Now we can identify the truly stupid people by their fake Rolex and their false sense of well-being.
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Now we can identify the truly stupid people by their fake Rolex and their false sense of well-being.
It didn't say the Rolexes were fake, only the prescriptions.
Too Early? (Score:5, Funny)
I looked at this summary over my first sip of coffee and read "A Third of World's Sperm From One Russian Man," and nearly spit it onto my macbook.
Titles like this should wait until after 10:00 am Eastern/7:00 am Pacific.
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(who needs karma anyway!)
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Similarly, have an egg or a pancake before replying, and you need not concern yourself with planing fried girls.
(I prefer to plane my girls baked, for the record...)
EXCLUSIVE: This is the next Google project! (Score:4, Informative)
Somewhere in Moscow, a geek named Oleg Nikolaenko is hunched over a pile of computers in a dank and dark basement.
Suddenly, a knock on the door!
Cautiously, Oleg watches through the door peephole at a tall, muscular stranger, with shades on, dressed all in black leather, except for a "Google" patch on the left side of his jacket.
The stranger (with a strong Austrian accent): "Oleg Nikolaenko?"
Several days later, at a Google HQ conference in Mountain View:
- "Yes, our motto is, and still remains: 'Do not be Evil'... We made an exception this one time, but the project nicknamed 'Extreme Prejudice (beta)' has been officially disbanded and the blueprints destroyed. The persons responsible for the projects have been sacked. Any questions?"
- "Yes, Mr Brin, what is the *other* project Google wanted to discuss?"
- "Well, we are pleased to announce that the new Google Map now incorporates 'Satellite Friend Tracking' to know -- in real time -- where all your friends are, anywhere in the world!"
In soviet Russia... (Score:3)
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...to jail.
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FBI versus Spamhaus (Score:2)
Fuck The Feel-Good Response (Score:2)
We all read about spam gangs and botnets regularly. We know that no one person is worth crap to the spam community; even if the 10 most prolific spammers were killed this afternoon the volume would not change appreciably - hell there is an argument th
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Really? Has the experiment been tried? Of course, it would be best to do this with a proper control. Each day for a month we'll either kill the top 10 remaining spammers, or just 10 people at random, with proper blinding. Then we'll measure the spam volume. At the end of the month, we
Luckily precedent is available. (Score:5, Funny)
They often skip this one in elementary history lessons on the matter; but it is arguably quite salient in today's interconnected world...
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PSA Ends.
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Shoot him in the face. (Score:2)
Shoot him in the face.
No!
Build a contraption in which he is placed that requires him to read spam email out loud continuously lest it begin doing evil things to his person.
Then when he's read all the spam shoot him in the face. Don't bother getting the gun ready.
Outsourcing everything (Score:2)
It used to be that spam kingpins like Alan Ralsky were based right here in the good old USA. Now it seems we're contracting out even our criminal behavior!
so ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Oleg Nikolaenko of Moscow, also know by his online nickname “Docent”, is thought to be the man behind the “Mega-D” bot network of 500,000 infected computers ... Atkinson, along with another spammer Jody Smith, were last year sentenced to prison terms for computer related offenses. Atkinson also later admitted to using Nikolaenko.
The article does not say Nikolaenko has been convicted of anything yet.
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In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
REAL SOVIET DAMAGE (Score:3)
Spambot increase your destruction of weak capitalist regime.
Eventually you will do REAL SOVIET DAMAGE [youtube.com]
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That'd be too quick. maybe every few minutes, add some starving weasels.
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Force him to read spam emails for the rest of his life.
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Naah, that's too uncivilised.
Force him to read spam emails for the rest of his life.
Wasn't that a scene in Clockwork Orange?
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>somebody should kill the bastard
Let me help fix the article for your benefit:
"The FBI believes that one third of the world's spam messages are being generated by one 23-year-old Russian man. Oleg Nikolaenko, also known by his alias Julian Assange, is being blamed for operating the Mega D botnet that sent spam emails from over 500,000 infected computers."
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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.
Yes but it might be 1/500,000 as bad - justifying the same sentence.
Re:somebody should kill the bastard (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, it's not. Find someone who would rather be raped to deleting 500,000 messages from their inbox.
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Can I delete them all in one go, or do I have to go through and pick them out? If it's the latter, I'd be tempted to go with rape.
Having said that, all the spam I get comes from marketing companies, and I find sales calls far more annoying. Even if the caller doesn't get through to me, reception still phones to ask if I want the call.
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How about give him 1 minute of jail time for every spam email sent. That sounds pretty fair. Of course he would never see the light of day given that he has sent over 37 million spam equating to just over 70 years jail.
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Just make him delete all the spam he sent.
From each inbox.
Manually.
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... one at a time?
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It's pointless trying to compare crimes like assault to crimes like email spam. Murder is obviously a terrible crime, it deprives someone of a life and causes misery for many others. I don't think anyone wants to make out that it's negligible by comparison. Yet, pretending that sending 22,265,000,000,000 spam emails each year is nothing more than a trivial
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You're right... we should just slap him in the face. Once for every spam message sent out from his servers, which would be 1/3 the spam sent out for the last decade or so.
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How about one hit with a spoon [youtube.com] for every spam sent?
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You should be shot for that comment!
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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.
Number of offenses counts for something, you know? Raping ten women does and should yield you a higher sentence then raping one.
So while each individual crime is tiny, do sum it up. So, for all I care, give him one second of jailtime for every spam message he sent. That'd get him put away for a couple hundred years.
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As someone once said (Kurt Tucholsky?) "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
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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.
Well, this is Russia we are talking about. I mean, if they can do it to journalists that question the government, certainly they could take out some basement dweller.
Or, if we really must follow the rule of law, then force him to make financial restitution for the 500k computers he has destroyed. He'll either kill himself or be destitute the rest of his pathetic life.
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Not trying to put a monetary value on lives, or the trauma caused by rape, but some quick googling dug up the figure $9,000,000,000 per year. That's the cost of fighting spam in the US alone. So, this fellow is costing the US roughly three billion dollars per year. That's a lot of lives that could have been saved, or rapes that could have been prevented, had they been spent elsewhere.
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No matter how you want to spin it, spamming clearly isn't as big crime as rape, violence or killing someone..
Yes agreed, lets consider a 1 second jail time for a spam offence. Now how many incidents of this 'crime' has he committed?
Wouldn't it just be easier (Score:2)
for everyone spammed to donate one penny to bribe the head of his electrical company to pull the plug on his apartment?
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Apologies for stereotyping... but you must be American...
Civilized countries arrest someone, then try him. People are not guilty until proven guilty... and you certainly won't get shot until proven guilty.
I would say " ... and you certainly won't get shot deliberately until proven guilty. People certainly have been shot [bbc.co.uk] before being proven guilty.
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> ... and you certainly won't get shot deliberately ...
Sounds pretty deliberate to me (self defense is still deliberate, even if that's what it was).
Re:somebody should kill the bastard (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
Ah, nice BULLSHITTING (Score:2)
The brazillian was NOT a tourist, he was an illegal alien who ran from the police trying to make an arrest. But I suppose "criminal fleeing from armed police and failing to respond to a stop order gets shot" isn't in line with your bleeding heart.
And since you are a bleeding heart who twist the truth to suite his agenda I will from now on assume that everything you say is twisted and a lie.
Just what the world needs, an advocate for truth who lies. That will get people to see things differently.
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he was an illegal alien who ran from the police trying to make an arrest
He wasn't an illegal alien, and the CCTV footage released of the incident shows he wasn't running, or wearing a big bulky jacket. NEXT!
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He wasn't an illegal alien
According to the Home Office, he arrived in Britain on 13 March 2002, on a six-month visitor's visa. After its expiry, he applied to stay on as a student, and was granted permission to remain until 30 June 2003. The Home Office said it had no record of any further correspondence, but added: "We have seen a copy of Mr Menezes' passport, containing a stamp apparently giving him indefinite leave to remain in the UK. On investigation, this stamp was not one that was in use by the Immigration and Nationality Di
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Then again,
Mark Whitby, a witness to the shooting, told Reuters that he observed Menezes wearing a large winter coat, which "looked out of place".
Anthony Larkin, another eyewitness, told the BBC that Menezes appeared to be wearing a "bomb belt with wires coming out."
- Wiki [wikipedia.org]
Unfortunately, we need to remember just how unreliable passer-by eyewitnesses really are; and the ability of your average citizen to suddenly "remember" exciting details about events, when told that those events may be been important, dangerous or controversial.
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The brazillian was NOT a tourist, he was an illegal alien who ran from the police trying to make an arrest. But I suppose "criminal fleeing from armed police and failing to respond to a stop order gets shot" isn't in line with your bleeding heart.
"Fleeing from armed police" means "sitting on a tube train"
"Illegal alien" means "Was here legally"
I'm amazed you didn't also mention
"jumped over barriers" means "stopped to pick up a metro on the way into the station"
"Wearing heavy clothing" means "wearing a deni
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http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Leaked_documents_reveal_killed_Brazilian_was_not_acting_suspiciously [wikinews.org]
Oops
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Like the Canadian advisor to the PM who recently called for the murder of Julian Assange?
You mean, like the FORMER advisor to the Prime Minister? If you're going to state "facts", get them straight: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/12/01/flanagan-wikileaks-assange.html [www.cbc.ca]. Here we have a guy, who has an opinion. BFD. He doesn't reflect the Canadian government's opinion in any way; he's a guy who said something on TV.
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Apparently America is not a "civilized" country because its citizens are free to use humor as they see fit. I sincerely doubt the GP would actually shoot this man, but it's Friday morning and many would like to start their morning with humor.
In its haste to bring about world peace, it seems the UN forgot to include humor in its declaration of human rights. We'll have to ask Libya and Sudan at the next meeting of the Human Rights Commission if they'll approve adding it.
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<booming announcer voice>
Spammer Island! The new pay per view event in which notorious spammers, 419ers, and love life scammers are dropped, unarmed and naked onto a deserted island and given a 24 hour head start! They choose a strategy, build a defense perimeter, combine forces, hide?! Do they go it alone?! Watch as we drop angry systems administrators from around the globe into the action! There's Tim, master of the bayonette! There's Tubby Tom, he prefers the Katana. L
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Apologies for stereotyping... but you must be American...
Apologies for stereotyping, but you must be a douchebag.
Civilized countries arrest someone, then try him. People are not guilty until proven guilty... and you certainly won't get shot until proven guilty.
Tell that to Anna Politkovskaya.
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"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.
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There are also a outcry from surprisingly mainstream figures in the US for the summary murder of Julian Assange. I can't think of any people from other countries who talk that way about US citizens, other
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Of course other countries do that, they just do a better job at keeping it secret. Just because you don't know of a case where that happens, doesn't mean there isn't one.
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The Soviets never managed to keep it a secret when they were doing those kinds of things
The Soviets just kill their vocal ex-patriots and reporters. The murderer is then elected to Parliament and granted immunity.
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Vagina Dentata! It'll make you crazed...
It means fuckin teeth, when you're going to get laid...
Oh thank God for thee,
Pornography...
Vagina Dentata!
Re:somebody should kill the bastard (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:somebody should kill the bastard (Score:4, Informative)
> I don't understand why people hate Email Ads so much.
They constitute more than 99% of email traffic.
> All you have to do is filter them out.
It is impossible to reliably filter them all without losing real mail.
> It's not worth killing someone.
Correct.
> Now the head of the RIAA or MPAA - that's a different story.
No it isn't.
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I would not kill the head of the RIAA or MPAA. Not because it is "inhumane". But because it does not solve anything.
If you want to deal with them, shut them down. Kill the organization. These organizations do not fall just because you kill the head. The head is replaceable, just like everything else. That's why killing them is so hard. It is insanely hard to show that the organization and not just a person within committed a crime. If everything fails, they'll find a sacrificial lamb. The bigger the crime,
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Killing the head of the MAFIAA would not kill the organization but the replacement head, fearing for his life, would stop sending extortion letters to rape citizens' wallets. And if not Head #2, then shoot him and maybe Heads 3 or 4 will be smarter.
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Not in this case. Because he doesn't have the full power in his hands. He often has no choice but to do what he has to do because the ones that fund him demand it.
You might get to the point where the head of the RIAA is some bum they picked up on the street and stuffed in a suit so he is a head you may cap if you so please while they continue business as usual.
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The mafia killed each other all the time and I don't recall them ever shutting down or changing their methods because of this.
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.
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How many billions and billions of dollars does spam cost in terms of hardware, bandwidth, and human effort?
How much does the opportunity cost of these billions of dollars hurt the world in terms of more productive progress?
How many financial lives are ruined through scams, trojans, and viruses that enter people's computers through spam?
This guy was likely responsible for ruining many lives.
Having dealt with an assortment of people dealing with emotional loss, whether because of molestation, rape, or financi
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ROFLMAO!
tks, it made my day!
Flamebait rate me more (Score:2)
because the hatred expressed by some of my fellow poster is disgusting.
Sorry, you guys need to get a grip.
People here are equating spamming with murder and rape. The mere suggestion is revolting. The punishments suggested in this thread in no way are justified by his crime.
Whats next, jaywalking in front of a Prius warrants your loss of life? Drive a hummer, become someone's bitch in jail?
I understand some make the suggestions in jest but from some of the responses I am not so sure.
It says a lot about th
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Well, the FBI doesn't say who the other two thirds comes from. 4Chan could /b/ doing just fine.
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