Russian Anti-Spam Advisor Accused of Spamming

Keith noted that Krebs has an interesting story on a Russian businessman being accused of running a spam ring while serving as an anti-spam adviser to the Russian government. It's a strange tale including an investigation in 2007 that was abandoned when the chief investigator was actually hired to work for the spammer. Not suspicious at all, no way.

Okay from RTFA.

[XnR'rn]

“We have here a merger between a criminal element and the government power which is unacceptable and inadmissible in any civilized society,” Ponomarev wrote. I don't see how it is much different from most of the rest of the system. In Russia, mostly the corruption is not just in the system. It is more like THE system. Quite a bit of Russian news coverage (mostly internal) is all about that.

Remember IronPort? They tried that

[Animats]

IronPort [ironport.com] used to play both sides of the street back in 2002. They sold rackmount "spam filter" boxes, and they also sold, er, "email delivery appliances". [ironport.com] These included mechanisms for using hundreds of different IP addresses, to avoid triggering spam filters. IronPort was also behind "Bonded Spammer" [usatoday.com], a scheme where they paid ISPs to whitelist their spam. They even bought SpamCop and built Bonded Spammer into it.

Cisco finally bought IronPort, and they got out of the spamming business. Bonded Spammer lives on as ReturnPath [returnpath.net]. If you have anything to do with mail processing, it's worth understanding how to identify ReturnPath email (the IP address is tagged in DNS) so it can be moved to the "bulk" folder. If you use SpamAssassin, it comes with a big negative value for ReturnPath emails to get them through filters. Change that to +2 or so; if somebody paid to use ReturnPath, they're a bulk sender.

Re:Too obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

See, the whole point of the "In Soviet Russia" joke is to flip reality around into something nonsensical.

Not quite. The canonical In Soviet Russia joke is "In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, the Party can always find you!" It makes sense both ways.