First offender punished under New Zealand anti-spam law

2009-02-01

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

Spammer faces NZD 100,000 fine.

A New Zealand man has become the first person to be prosecuted for spamming under the country’s 2007 Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act.

Lance Atkinson confessed to having organized a group of people trading under the name Sancash which was responsible for sending more than two million messages over a three-month period at the end of 2007. The messages advertised the products of a company which paid Atkinson a commission of between 53% and 56% of the purchase price of each item sold. Atkinson now faces a fine of NZ$100,000 (approximately £35,000).

Meanwhile, the National Communications Commission of Taiwan has drafted a bill that will allow recipients of spam to claim damages from spammers of between NT$500 and NT$2,000 per email. Statistics from the Taiwan Internet Association indicate that the number of Internet users in Taiwan exceeded 10 million in December and that the country’s users receive an average of 29 spam messages per day. The draft will be submitted for approval next month.

Latest articles:

Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

Aditya Sood & Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited to compromise the C&C panel in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

Cryptojacking on the fly: TeamTNT using NVIDIA drivers to mine cryptocurrency

TeamTNT is known for attacking insecure and vulnerable Kubernetes deployments in order to infiltrate organizations’ dedicated environments and transform them into attack launchpads. In this article Aditya Sood presents a new module introduced by…

Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

Collector-stealer, a piece of malware of Russian origin, is heavily used on the Internet to exfiltrate sensitive data from end-user systems and store it in its C&C panels. In this article, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360…

Fighting Fire with Fire

In 1989, Joe Wells encountered his first virus: Jerusalem. He disassembled the virus, and from that moment onward, was intrigued by the properties of these small pieces of self-replicating code. Joe Wells was an expert on computer viruses, was partly…

Run your malicious VBA macros anywhere!

Kurt Natvig wanted to understand whether it’s possible to recompile VBA macros to another language, which could then easily be ‘run’ on any gateway, thus revealing a sample’s true nature in a safe manner. In this article he explains how he recompiled…

Bulletin Archive