Large companies (un?)knowingly hire spammers

This morning, CSO and MacKeeper published joint articles on a massive data leak from a marketing company. (Update: 2019: both articles are gone, a cached version of the CSOnline link is at https://hackerfall.com/story/the-fall-of-an-empire-spammers-expose-their-entire)  This company, River City Media (RCM), failed to put a password on their online backups sometime. This leaked all of the company’s data out to the Internet at large. MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris Vickery discovered the breach back in December and shared the information with Spamhaus and CSO online.
The group has spent months going through the data from this spammer. As of this morning, the existence of the breach and an overview of the extent of their operation were revealed by CSO and MacKeeper. Additionally, Spamhaus listed the network on the Register of Known Spamming Operations (ROKSO).


There are a couple interesting pieces of this story relevant to legitimate marketers.
The biggest issue is the number of brands who are paying spammers to send mail from them. The CSO article lists just some of the brands that were buying mail services from RCM:

[…] Nike, LifeLock, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, MetLife, Victoria’s Secret, Kitchen Aide, Yankee Candle, Bath & Body Works, Gillette, Match.com, Dollar Shave Club, Dewalt, DirecTV, Covergirl, Clinique, Maybelline, Terminix, and AT&T.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the industry. We described this many years ago in a series of articles about mainstream spam. (Note: the organization in the article has cleaned up their act and no longer uses affiliates).
Addresses were collected through many ways, including the use of co-reg. Chris Vickery explains:

Well-informed individuals did not choose to sign up for bulk advertisements over a billion times. The most likely scenario is a combination of techniques. One is called co-registration. That’s when you click on the “Submit” or “I agree” box next to all the small text on a website. Without knowing it, you have potentially agreed your personal details can be shared with affiliates of the site.
You are never told who the affiliates are and groups like River City Media capitalize on that aspect. One line of the leaked chat logs explains it all very succinctly:
“The key is sincerity.  Once you can fake that…”

Legitimate companies do buy co-reg data, still. The problem is that there’s no real permission associated with the address. In the absolute best case scenario, permission is taken by the co-reg provider rather than given by the recipient. All too many co-reg vendors go out of their way to hide the fact that they will sell the addresses in their privacy policies. This isn’t transparent. This isn’t real permission.
One argument I’ve heard over and over about laws, particularly CASL, is that it’s targeting the wrong companies. As the argument goes, the real problem with spam is spammers, not legitimate companies. But CASL and other laws target legitimate companies. I never really bought into that argument as it’s clear to me a lot of the money supporting spammers comes from the legitimate companies spending real marketing funds.
Legitimate companies are paying third parties to send spam on their behalf and are profiting. For a long time brands have pretended they’re not responsible for the mail. This recent breach shows that they are paying spammers to send mail on their behalf.
Looks like maybe the laws are targeting the right companies.

After this was posted, River City Media sued Chris Vickery and others. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4685667/1/river-city-media-llc-v-kromtech-alliance-corporation/. The case was settled in September 2018. 

February 2017: The Month In Email
Verizon changes but no time line

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One way to deal with B2B spam

We’ve been talking a lot about B2B spam recently. I’ve posted repeatedly, Steve wrote a post about it yesterday. It’s in the forefront of our minds because we’re dealing with just so much of it. Multiple emails a day asking for “just 10 minutes of your time.” Of course, the 10 minutes isn’t really just 10 minutes. Sure, the call might be 10 minutes, but there’s overhead to that call that will probably eat 20 – 30 minutes of time. That’s at best.
Because they’re using providers who don’t notice or don’t care about the spam, there’s little to be done. No one is going to stop them from mailing me. They are required to comply with the law, but 99% of the mail doesn’t. Which gave me an idea.
I’ve started replying to every incident of “just 10 minutes of your time” with a pleasant email thanking them for their interest in our CAN SPAM verification program. I point out that I have noticed at least one violation and we’re happy to consult with them on how to fix it for a fee.
Wait? You mean they’re not interrupting my time simply to receive a sales pitch? Well. Gee. I’m just replying to them.
It seems petty, but we’re less than 2 weeks into 2017 and I already have over a dozen of these “one time” emails. If history tells me anything, these same people will follow up in a week, and then 2 weeks, and then a month. Meanwhile, new people are going to be sending me a request for 10 minutes of my time, and their followups and in a month I’ll be getting a dozen emails a week. In two months I’ll be getting 2 dozen. In 3 months it will be 4 dozen.
And, yeah, most of these messages do violate CAN SPAM. Most of them by not including an unsubscribe links, which makes getting the mail to stop a challenge. There’s no way to unsubscribe, so it’s either answer it or just keep getting contacted. I wrote last year about the woman who continued to email me for months. She even announced she was going to call 911 because clearly I was injured and unable to answer her mail.  Multiple times she promised to stop mailing me, but never did.
I do feel bad for many of these senders. They’ve been sold on a prospecting tool by vendors who fail to provide them with a minimal level of guidance. Even just mentioning that there are laws regulating email, and they should comply with them would be better than nothing.
In many ways I find this kind of spam more annoying than the viagra or the malware that ends up in my mailbox. Those can be selected and deleted pretty easily. These, however, have subject lines that look just like my legitimate business mail. I have to read them and figure stuff out. It’s a total PITA.
EDIT: And it’s not even effective according to some experts.

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ROKSO lawsuit settled

Earlier this year Ken Magill reported that a judge in the UK was allowing a libel case against Spamhaus to go forward. I thought for sure I’d blogged about the case at the time, but apparently I didn’t.
The short version is that today Spamhaus announced the lawsuit was settled and the complainants paid for Spamhaus’ legal fees.
As with most legal cases the details are complex and convoluted.  Let me try to sum up.

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ROKSO

ROKSO is the Register of Known Spamming Operations. It is a list of groups that have been disconnected from more than 3 different networks for spamming. ROKSO is a little bit different than most of the Spamhaus lists. The listings themselves talk more about the background of the listees and less about the specific emails that are the problem.
Many ISPs and ESPs use ROKSO during customer vetting processes.
Networks can be listed on ROKSO without any mail being sent from those networks. These listings are as much about just categorizing and recording associated networks as they are about blocking spam.
Spamhaus does not accept delisting requests for ROKSO records. In order to be delisted from ROKSO there must be a 6 month period with no spam traceable to the ROKSO entity. After that 6 months the listee can petition for a review of the record. If the spam has stopped their record is retired.
In my experience there is often a lot of research put into each ROKSO record and not all that information is made public.
The only time a record is changed is if Spamhaus is convinced they made a mistake. This does happen, but it’s not that common. Given the amount of research that goes into a ROKSO record, there is a fairly high burden of proof to demonstrate that the information is actually incorrect.
It is possible to get delisted off ROKSO. In all of the cases I know about, the listed entity either got out of email altogether or they radically changed their business model.

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