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| Another reason not to vote for Ron Paul: his supporters are spammers! |
| 2007-10-31 |
| If Texas congressman Ron Paul is elected president in 2008, he may be the first leader of the free world put into power with the help of a global network of hacked PCs spewing spam, according to computer-security researchers who've analyzed a recent flurry of e-mail supporting the long-shot Republican candidate. "This is clearly a criminal act in support of a campaign, which has been committed with or without their knowledge," says Gary Warner, the University of Alabama at Birmingham's director of research in computer forensics. . . . Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton says the campaign has no knowledge of the scam. Warner himself says that he has no reason to believe that the Paul campaign had anything to do with these messages. . . . The spamming allegations are based on a slew of e-mails captured by contributors to the university's Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project, a research venture that receives 2.5 million spam messages a day, and selects about 100,000 a week for analysis. The project receives its spam from other researchers with ties to ISPs, and in some cases from "trap" addresses that have never been used for any other purpose. They were received by the lab following the latest televised Republican debate Sunday afternoon, and had 16 different subject lines, including "Ron Paul Wins GOP Debate! HMzjoqO" and "Ron Paul Exposes Federal Reserve! SBHBcSO." The random string of characters at the end is a common spammer's technique to circumvent bulk e-mail filtering. The spam went to "several hundred" e-mail addresses harvested for the university project, says Warner. The e-mails had phony names attached to real-looking e-mail addresses. When lab researchers examined the IP addresses of the computers from which the messages had been sent, it turned out that they were sprinkled around the globe in countries as far away from each other as South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Brazil. "The interesting thing was that we had the same subject line from the same IP address, and it claimed to be from different users from within the United States," Warner says. One e-mail was designed to look as if it came from within a major Silicon Valley corporation, he notes. But when the researchers looked up the IP address, the computer from which the note was sent was actually in South Korea. Another e-mail that was designed to look as if it came from Houston was sent from Italy. That pattern led Warner to conclude that the messages had been laundered through a botnet -- also a standard spammer practice, though a decidedly illegal one. The body of a message examined by Wired News covered familiar Paul campaign themes, such as ending the war and eliminating the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |