LWD - Spam's Empire

EdisonRex submitted the following "
Chapter 3 - The Dogs Hunt, and Let's Meet Oleg

Damage Control

By Saturday, March 18th, the situation was not looking good. A mountain of references to EdisonRex was mounting up in Google. Looking at a Google search of the term "Star's Empire" doesn't reveal Oleg's site until page 6 (as of this writing, this is still the case), but a search on "EdisonRex" alone produced 60 pages of memberlist posts. It was a very depressing moment. However, having thought about the significance of the links back to LittleBlackDog in so many of them, the thought occurred that perhaps there was a way to salvage the situation. It would involve a number of strategies, tasks, mini projects, and good old investigation. The project would likely take one person an immense amount of time, but the end result, if successful, would be worth all of the effort put into it. A strong and public statement would need to be made, in the most professional and dignified manner.

Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines "ethics" as the "discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation”, "a set of moral principles or value" or "a theory or system of moral values". Ethics assists individuals in deciding when an act is moral or immoral; right or wrong. Ethics can be grounded in natural law, religious tenets, parental and family influence, educational experiences, life experiences, and cultural and societal expectations.

An ethical individual by nature has limited choices in life, as compared to the unethical individual. The upside of accepting the limitation is that the choices an ethical individual makes are much more likely to be successful, and gains respect from people that the individual comes in contact with, and encourages self-respect as well. There is also a concept of Karma which holds that doing good deeds brings good fortune; bad deeds, bad fortune. Philosophically these two belief systems carry broad similarities, and they describe in human terms the complex concept of cause and effect.

I felt no small measure of relief when the community rose up to back me. What started as a solo effort, which was going to take a lot of individual effort, suddenly had more helpers than could immediately be utilised. The irony of a small army of technically capable individuals against a spammer with script-kiddie tools immediately came to mind. We had to get organised, and quickly. Having identified a number of immediate and urgent tasks, the investigations began.

Preserving evidence in the fluid world of websites and Google reference ranking requires good search skills, a very good idea of what to look for, and good timing. Especially when it's gathering as much evidence of a spamshot as can be captured, and taking screenshots of all of the timestamps and storing them away. And there were a lot of spamshots to find.

Know Your Spammer

It is very hard to actually have anonymity on the Internet. Crackers and 1337 |-|5x0Rz and CIA agents aside, if a person commits a series of acts that fit a particular pattern, the 2nd order information becomes clearer and, even without a name, it becomes easier over time to find that person's handiwork on the Internet because of unique characteristics. It is not unlike graffiti, conceptually. For example, direct2deal.com always does its spamshots from India. Nigerian spammers generally post from systems that, amusingly enough, hail from Lagos. If the law really wants to find you, in Europe or America, you are very likely to be found, especially as there is so much information on you. If you have been on the Internet for any length of time, you can be found, especially using as fairly sticky a spam method as memberlist spam. If you aren't a law enforcement agency, it might be a bit harder to gain access to the good stuff, but it isn't really that hard if you are willing to pay for it.

Of course, it is really a lot easier when one publicly attaches one's nick to one's real name on numerous registration pages, and one does it before any of the current timeframes being researched. It is even more convincing if done in only a few places, consistent with real nick usage. And, of course, if, defying all reason, one sends out one's first spamshot using that nick, advertising a domain to which one is registered as the owner, with one's real name attached. Even more when the nick appears as a member of one of the Russian speaking clans in the game. The investigation becomes a lot easier. But it still pays to be thorough.

Who is LonelyK?

Despite some strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that the owner of a text-based multi-user web game was using phpBB and other php-based scripts to directly advertise his website on an incredible number of forums, we felt that nobody could be that, well, brazen. It would display a level of understanding of the ethical use of the Internet (of which the basics have been fairly thoroughly described in this article) approaching the Neanderthal era. But based on the lack of any credible response (indeed, a lack of any concrete response whatsoever) we are increasingly certain that LonelyK is indeed the registered owner of the domain stars-empire.com. A run through a series of Invision Power Board-based forums occurred on February 23rd, and again on the 25th. The first phpBB run happened on the 22nd and again on the 28th. The LonelyK that hit the phpBB forums had no real name (phpBB only requires a valid email address). We've found LonelyK spamshots right up to March 14th.

Perhaps a telling item is that LonelyK appears to be cleaning up after himself. On Sunday, March 19th, hits for LonelyK abounded. The spamshots from February 22nd, 23rd, 24th and March 3rd and 4th are being cleaned up much better than the later spamshots, even from correllating EdisonRex/LonelyK shots. It wouldn't make sense for a forum admin to leave one and not the other. On pdxnet.net we have captured screenshot evidence of both LonelyK and EdisonRex, but today there is just EdisonRex. And pdxnet.net does not appear to be a strongly administered forum.

Another incident happened during the investigation. A note explaining the premise of this project was sent to Oleg's mail account oleghelp at mail.ru. It was sent via a yahoo.com account. It bounced within 2 minutes, mail refused by the account. The same mail was sent to edisonrex at mail.ru. It was accepted, and within a couple of hours, a new LonelyKnight had registered as a new member on LittleBlackDog. The email account? Oleghelp – at yahoo.com. That account remains activated, and no spam has been delivered to LittleBlackDog from it.

We have repeatedly invited Oleg Karabanov to discuss his side of the story. All we have seen so far are stiff, confused sounding denials by the admin of the Star's Empire user forums about the source of the spamming, which were made during a retaliatory attack by incensed members of another forum, which resulted in the hijack of another person's nick, and its subsequent use as a spamshot mule along with EdisonRex. Maybe LonelyK is too busy playing the game. We hear it takes a while.

That, however, is the next part of the story.

Next, There Is Another One, and Revenge, Counter Revenge.
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Telling it like it is...