Database of 1.4 billion e-mails and names leaked from World’s Biggest Spam Networks
Huge database of e-mail addresses has been leaked by the company known as one of the biggest SPAM senders – River City Media (RCM). Unencrypted backup from January 2017 contains more than 1.37 bilion e-mail contacts with additional information (names, addresses, IPs etc.).
Security researcher Chris Vickery of MacKeeper and Steve Ragan of CSOOnline discovered an unsecured and publicly exposed repository of network-available backup files linked to a notorious spamming organization called River City Media (RCM), led by notorious spammers Matt Ferrisi and Alvin Slocombe. According to MacKeeper security researcher Vickery, RCM, which claims to be a legitimate marketing firm, is responsible for sending around a billion unwanted messages per day.
Besides exposing more than a billion email addresses, real names, IP addresses and, in some cases, physical addresses, the leak exposed many documents that revealed the inner workings of RCM’s spam operation. Wondering how spamming operations can be profitable? One leaked text shows a single day of activity of RCM that sent 18 million emails to Gmail users and 15 million to AOL users, and the total take of the spamming company was around $36,000.
The researchers have reported that details of RSM’s operations and its abusive scripts and techniques have been sent to Microsoft, Apple, Salted Hash, Spamhaus, and others affected parties. Meanwhile, the researchers have also notified law enforcement agencies, which they says, have expressed keen interest in the matter.
In response to the latest discovery, Spamhaus will be blacklisting RCM’s entire infrastructure from its Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database that tracks professional spam operations and lists them using a three-strike rule.
source: thehackernews.com