Behind Your Business

One of the world's most notorious spammers has reached the end of the road -- or at least a rest stop -- that could last for the next 51 months. Alan Ralsky, known as the spam king, was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in prison by U.S. District Judge Marianne O. Battani in Detroit. In June, Ralsky pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud, and to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.

The case against Ralsky and a number of other defendants was brought mostly in the Eastern District of Michigan. The scheme focused on using spam to promote stocks for U.S. companies owned and controlled by people in Hong Kong and China, the U.S. Department of Justice said. The indictment focused on the period from January 2004 to September 2005.

The e-mails, according to the DOJ, contained false or misleading information and were sent via software that made it difficult to trace. Various strategies -- including falsified headers, proxy computers (i.e. botnets), and falsely registered domain names -- were used to evade antispam software and entice recipients to read the bogus messages.

A Spam Innovator

Henry Stern, senior security researcher at Cisco, applauded the sentencing. "My understanding of all the evidence that I've seen over the past number of years is that Mr. Ralsky is one of the founding fathers of modern spam," he said.

Ralsky's main innovation, according to Stern, significantly worsened the problem. "He was one of the first persons who used botnets for spam," Stern said. "That is going away from using their own hardware to using people's computers that are compromised with viruses. That was a big change in spamming, taking it from small scale to the spiraling snowball we have now, the massive spam volumes."

Mike Murray, chief information security officer for Foreground Security, said...