DOJ and FBI Ensure Spam Prosecutions

The federal bureau of investigation has disclosed to have almost 70 active probes in the spam scams. According to the news reported by Theinquirer.com on July 13, 2007, the FBI and DOJ, while speaking to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC's) Spam Summit held in Washington, declared that people could expect more botnet and spam prosecutions in the next few months.

J.Keith Mularski, FBI's special agent, said at the summit that FBI has worked with the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), which is collaboration between universities, law-enforcement agencies and private companies, to identify the spammers.

As per the news by Washington.com on July 12, 2007, Mularski said the Internet Crime Complaint Centre, which is a joint venture of the FBI and National White Collar Crime Centre receives more than 22,000 complaints about cyber attack every month, as compared to 18,000 complaints a month last year.

As per the IDG, FBI and DOJ (Department of Justice), last month (June 2007) investigations revealed more than a million botnet crime victims.

As published by AHN on July 12, 2007, according to InfoWorld, Mona Sedky Spivack, a lawyer in the DOJ Computer Divison's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section said during the conference that they would surely prevent the spammers by imposing some criminal liabilities.

In June, the FBI and DOJ introduced Operation Bot Roast targeting the attackers who use networks of exploited PC, often known as botnets, to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks and to send spam.

The DOJ will not only target the "bot herders" the criminals who control botnets, but will also attack the "bot brokers" the people who negotiate the sale of botnet resources. As per the news by Washingtonpost.com on July 12, 2007, Spivack said that they would impose some criminal liabilities on the spammers as huge fiscal exchange take place here, says Spivack, as reported by Washingtonpost.com on July 12, 2007.

The DOJ and other federal agencies are attacking stock-scheme campaigns. In a typical "pump and dump" stock scheme, spammers purchased cheap stocks and send large amount of stock telling the users that the price of the spam is supposed to raise. The stock price certainly rises, obviously, because of the spam campaign and the spammers sell them out at huge profit.

As per the news published by Washingtonpost.com, Spivack said, that in spite of the news report of such schemes, they still work. But, it only appeals to unskilled investors who are day traders at home.

Related article: Dixie College Suffers Data Hack

» SPAMfighter News - 7/24/2007