Microsoft Sues Spammer Mizhen in Federal Court

Software giant Microsoft has sued spammer Boris Mizhen of Connecticut (US) under the federal CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) Act. Mizhen is alleged to have sent unsolicited spam e-mails to the customers of Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail and to have evaded its spam filters.

The lawsuit claims that the defendants were engaged in a sophisticated scheme to bypass the Company's spam filters by exploiting junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP) and Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) of Microsoft to send spam e-mails in large numbers everyday to the Hotmail users. These exploited services are free of cost services designed to protect Windows Live Hotmail users from spam.

The Company says in its complaint that Mizhen and his associates tricked the company's anti-spam system by making millions of fake e-mail accounts and then using those accounts to detect the messages sent by him as "not spam".

In its lawsuit, Microsoft has also named some companies as defendants, including the three companies allegedly controlled by Mizhen: New Age Opt-In, Inc., Media Network, Inc. and Permission, Inc. Microsoft claims that all these companies pose as online ad companies, but are in fact used to send spam e-mails by their owner (Mizhen).

The complaint also reveals how the defendants allegedly manipulated statistics on which the anti-spam system of Microsoft relies. They created fake accounts and moved up to 200,000 of the messages send by them per day from spam folders into inboxes.

However, one of Mizhen's associates said that these weren't spam messages and explained that several users had moved these messages from junk folders to inboxes. But in actual, those user accounts are supposed to be Mizhen's creation for this malicious purpose.

It is noteworthy that Mizhen has a long past record as a spammer, as per the federal records. For several years, he was placed in Spamhaus's ROKSO (Register of Known Spam Operations) list. It had been sued in 2003 as well by Microsoft for sending junk e-mails to its web-based Hotmail service.

Related article: Microsoft Patches Live OneCare to Tackle Quarantined E-Mails

» SPAMfighter News - 6/26/2010