NOVEMBER 30--An FBI investigation has identified the young Russian man behind the notorious “Mega-D” botnet, the malicious network of more than 500,000 infected computers that was capable of sending ten billion spam e-mails a day and, until late last year, reportedly accounted for nearly a third of the spam clogging the Internet, The Smoking Gun has learned.
Why are we wasting our time with this? If anything Mega-D (sick name by the way) should be recognized for his accomplishments. 1/3 of all the Spam on the internet? That's one of the more impressive stats I've heard in a while.
But really what is the harm in spam? At this point the only people falling for these things are willingly getting involved or are so dumb they're beyond help. I mean have you checked your spam folder lately? These things are hilarious, porn and male enhancer offers, discounted luxury items, tales of foreign royalty in need of your help, a ridiculous amount of foreign bride offers, and apparently, I've won approximately 12 different lotteries in Europe and the UK within the last month. Each either containing infinite grammatical and spelling errors, or impossible promises of riches from absolute strangers (not to mention there would seem to be a very large amount of millionaire heirs in some of these African countries which are supposedly impoverished).
How are these anymore dangerous than actual junk mail and credit card offers that come through regular mail? I'm going to say on average I receive 7 credit card offers a week, despite the on-going debt crisis and credit reform. In addition, who hasn't received these ludicrous pyramid scheme letters, if I send $1 out to twelve different people and then tell 10 myself I'll somehow make $130k this year. People are far more likely to fall for that than spam which is largely filtered (unless it actually works? Does it actually work? excuse me, I'm going to go get 12 stamps).
