Spam conference update

From developers, to government officials from France, to Internet Lawyers — this spam conference is definitely one of the more interesting conferences I’ve attended. As an example, the last presentation given by John Praed, entitled “You’ve got Jail,” walked us through the investigation and prosecution of Jeremy Jaynes. Jeremy Jaynes was prosecuted as a spammer and given the maximum sentence found in Virginia Law – 9 years in prison, 3 years for each count and a fine of $2100. The technology and sophistication of spammers are amazing as they try to falsify and acquire email addresses from spam harvesting bots. Mr. Jaynes had 21 locations across the US and Europe with each spam harvester moving from one IP address to another inbetween continents.

Another interesting presentation was given by an Attorney Matthew Prince who introduce Project Honeypot. This is an interesting project that attempts at “stopping the cycle” of spammers. According to the FAQ on their site:

Project Honey Pot is a distributed system of decoy email addresses website administrators can include on their sites in order to gather information about the robots and spiders spammers use. We collate data on how addresses are harvested, distributed, and eventually spammed in order to understand the entire spam cycle.

More later…