- Jay Stuler says he’s been receiving unsolicited bulk e-trash from mass spammer Brian Haberstroh aka Atriks Inc aka Distributed Mail Corporation since at least April 2003.
So Stuler complained.
“As spamming is against the Terms of Service of almost every ISP, the spammers found themselves losing their accounts,” he says on his web page. “They apparently are angry that spamming has become difficult for them and blame me.”
What can a spammer do about someone who doesn’t want any more e-garbage in his/her incoming?
Take them to court.
“I believe this is a frivilous lawsuit designed to harass and intimidate,” says Stuler. “If I can be sued simply for complaining about spammers, then anyone can be.”
Hit Stuler’s site for related documents.
In the meanwhile, Brian Haberstroh aka Atriks Inc aka Distributed Mail Corporation isn’t unknown to Spamhaus, which tracks rampant spammers, spam Gangs and spam ‘services’.
On Haberstroh's e-garbage, under Advice to ISPs, “This spam is heavily laden with recipient-identifying tags,” says Spamhaus. “Passing along the spam to the spammer, or to customers who will in turn pass it back to the spammer, does not stop the spam, it just helps the spammer listwash out reporting addresses.
“Note to companies looking at advertising partners:
“Haberstroh's services are resold under the Meditay and Passionup (or Passion Up) names, long associated with ROKSO spammer Kevin Lung, himself a (ex?) partner of Eric Reinertsen.”
Earlier, it states:
“ ‘Sendmails’ or ‘Atriks’ is Brian Haberstroh's distributed e-mail distribution system using proxies on broadband long-lease (or static) IP addresses to send bulk e-mail. It was designed and intended to get bulk e-mail past existing filters. While some legitimate bulk mailers do experience occasional delivery problems, the correct way to resolve that is seeking permission from the recipient, not sneaking around the filters. Sendmails also uses a seemingly endless variety of envelope senders making filtering on ‘From’ difficult for most end-users as well as ISPs. Haberstroh has also employed a variety of DNS implementations which (temporarily) foiled efforts of postmasters to keep his unwanted mail off of their servers and out of their user accounts. Those techniques include locating DNS servers outside of his primary network at frequently-changing addresses (avoids nulling the nameservers to keep envelopes from resolving, avoiding a common filter rule), and even spoofing DNS records to point at the spam recipient's MX record.
“The VirtualMDA system appears to violate the recent CAN-SPAM law by falsifying the transmission path, i.e. there is no trace of the original Atriks/Sendmails server (where the e-mail originates) showing in the headers, only the IP address of the victim running their software. This is all done, they admit, to try and sneak past spam filters.
“Spamhaus has received numerous reports of the VirtualMDA software discovered running on people's computers without their permission, they have no idea what it's doing or how it got installed there, and they are certainly not getting paid for the use of their computer (as Atriks/Sendmail claims to do). If a trojan/virus is being used to surreptitiously install VirtualMDA in order to take over someone's computer to send spam, this is a blatant violation of the CAN-SPAM law and a felony.”
