Harvesting detection project aims to prosecute address abusers.
A community project dedicated to gathering information on the collection of email addresses for spamming purposes has brought a lawsuit in a Virginia court against the as-yet-unidentified spammers who fell into their traps.
The
Project Honey Pot
system was set up by Utah-based anti-spam firm
Unspam Technologies
, who help design and enforce anti-spam laws and regulations. The projects members install free software on their websites, which generates hidden email addresses on their pages and wait for them to be gathered by crawlers searching for addresses to include in spam databases. Once
Project Honey Pot
receives spam sent to one of the addresses, which are not used for any legitimate purpose, they know that the data has been picked up by harvesting software.
The lawsuit, brought in Virginia due to a combination of particularly strong anti-spam laws and a large number of known spam operations being based there, claims compensation from the spammers, who could be charged $1 per message under the Virginia law and more under the federal CAN-SPAM legislation, which has extra strong provision for the abuse of addresses harvested from websites.
Although the spammers have not been named, the court has been provided with IP addresses and other data which could lead to their detection and arrest; if the spammers who sent junk mail to all 36,000 addresses given out by Virginia-based community members are brought to book, compensation levied could be over $1 billion.
Details of the case from
Project Honey Pot
are
here
, with a PDF of the official complaint they filed
here
. More analysis of the case in the
Washington Post
is
here
.
Posted on 01 May 2007 by
Virus Bulletin
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