U.S. Internet users should expect a growing number of prosecutions for sending spam and related activities, such as creating
botnets, officials with two U.S. law enforcement organizations said Thursday.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has 70 active investigations into spam-related crimes, said FBI special agent J.
Keith Mularski, speaking at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's spam summit. The FBI has worked with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), a partnership between law enforcement agencies, universities and private businesses, to identity spammers, he said.
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The NCFTA, launched in 2002, has identified more than 100 "significant spammers," including five tied to traditional organized
crime, Mularski said.
Partnerships with industry are important to fight cybercrime, Mularski said. The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a joint operation of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, gets more than 22,000 complaints about cybercrime each month, up from 18,000 complaints a month last year, he said.
"If we don't address it together, it's only going to get worse," he said. "Industry has all the information, because these
guys are hitting their networks."
The U.S. Department of Justice is targeting several spam-related activities, added Mona Sedky Spivack, a trial attorney in
the DOJ Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. In June, the DOJ and FBI launched Operation Bot Roast, targeting criminals who use networks of compromised computers, often called botnets, to send spam and launch distributed
denial-of-service attacks.
In addition to targeting "bot herders," criminals who control botnets, the DOJ will begin targeting "bot brokers," the people who negotiate the sale of botnet
resources, she said. "We're going to start pegging them with some criminal liability," she said. "There is a lot of money
getting exchanged here."
Botnets and anonymous proxies are popular with spammers right now because they don't have to use their own computer resources
to send the e-mail messages, Spivack said. This makes it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to track down spammers.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
