MAY BE RUNNING ILLEGAL ‘BOTNET’
Spamalot, S.C. (TPS) - If you enjoy the comedic genius of the legendary British group “Monty Python,” then you no doubt know that “Spamalot” is more than just the popular musical parody of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it’s an enchanting place where Knights dance on tables, beat up court jesters, dodge wild birds, kick fruit and eat ham and jam and Spam — a lot — while singing from the diaphragm — also, a lot.
And so it is that from this mythical place we find another creature… the Ron Paul supporter. Normally these “people” should be avoided at all costs, but as the presidential primaries draw closer to a conclusion, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so. That’s because it turns out that most of the supporters may not be people at all, but rather an Internet spamming network called a “botnet.”
If Texas congressman Ron Paul is elected president in 2008, he may be the first leader of the free world put into power with the help of a global network of hacked PCs spewing spam, according to computer-security researchers who’ve analyzed a recent flurry of e-mail supporting the long-shot Republican candidate.
“This is clearly a criminal act in support of a campaign, which has been committed with or without their knowledge,” says Gary Warner, the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s director of research in computer forensics. “The question is, will we see more and more of this, or will this bring shame to the campaigns and will they make clear that this is not a form of acceptable behavior by their supporters?” Warner pointed to provisions of the federal Can-Spam Act. [...]
The spamming allegations are based on a slew of e-mails captured by contributors to the university’s Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project, a research venture that receives 2.5 million spam messages a day, and selects about 100,000 a week for analysis. The project receives its spam from other researchers with ties to ISPs, and in some cases from “trap” addresses that have never been used for any other purpose.
They were received by the lab following the latest televised Republican debate Sunday afternoon, and had 16 different subject lines, including “Ron Paul Wins GOP Debate! HMzjoqO” and “Ron Paul Exposes Federal Reserve! SBHBcSO.” The random string of characters at the end is a common spammer’s technique to circumvent bulk e-mail filtering.
The spam went to “several hundred” e-mail addresses harvested for the university project, says Warner.
The e-mails had phony names attached to real-looking e-mail addresses. When lab researchers examined the IP addresses of the computers from which the messages had been sent, it turned out that they were sprinkled around the globe in countries as far away from each other as South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Brazil.
“The interesting thing was that we had the same subject line from the same IP address, and it claimed to be from different users from within the United States,” Warner says.
One e-mail was designed to look as if it came from within a major Silicon Valley corporation, he notes. But when the researchers looked up the IP address, the computer from which the note was sent was actually in South Korea. Another e-mail that was designed to look as if it came from Houston was sent from Italy.
That pattern led Warner to conclude that the messages had been laundered through a botnet — also a standard spammer practice, though a decidedly illegal one.
The body of a message examined by Wired News covered familiar Paul campaign themes, such as ending the war and eliminating the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. It also read:
“Ron Paul is for the people, unless you want your children to have human implant RFID chips, a National ID card and create a North American Union and see an economic collapse far worse than the great depression. Vote for Ron Paul he speaks the truth and the media and government is afraid of him.”
Last week, the prominent conservative blog Redstate banned new Paul supporters from posting on its site because of their “shilling” for the candidate in conversations that had nothing to do with politics. Other sites have disabled their online polls, because they suspected that they were being gamed by Ron Paul supporters. [Wired News]
While it’s certainly not news to us that the Ron Paul nutjobs were spamming anything and everything possible, it’s certainly news that law enforcement is catching on.
As FITSNews’ Sic Willie noted, “For a candidate espousing such hardcore libertarian views, we thought it was rather odd that a massive spam went out shortly after the last Republican presidential debate, sending millions of unsolicited e-mails through what Wired magazine called a ‘world-wide network of hijacked computers’ utilizing ‘common methods to defeat spam filters.’ Paul’s campaign didn’t have anything to do with the e-mail blasts, obviously, but when your core demographic is a loose coalition of Emos, White Priders, Pot Smokers and Star Trek Convention rejects, it’s hard to blame it on anybody else’s ‘overzealous supporters.’”
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Primary Season, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I thought I’d drop you a spam or two. MMMM nice and tasty. Give me a break. If you like spam don’t eat it. I don’t like Fox News so I don’t watch it. Simple enough. Since the news is making a story of this and not the real Ron Paul news it leads me to believe that the only thing they will cover on a candidate is what they want to people to believe. If you want people to believe that all of the supporters of Pauls were from Spam and they regenerate into Spammers have it your way. But when it comes down to it you know we must be winning. Otherwise you will have no way to explain your defeat. Because you’ve been pumping people up with all this BS that Giuliani, McCain, Thompson etc are the top tier.
Tell me, do I pass the Turing test when I point out that you are a worthless c***?
NOTE: Comment edited by Editor for vulgarity.
How to Whip This Ron Paul Character and All His Whacky Followers.
Ron Paul can be defeated by ignorance. Ignore him if you can.
By lies. Misrepresent his positions whenever possible.
By word gaming. As Lenin advised, “First, confuse the vocabulary.”
By contempt. Dismiss him as amusing and pathetic.
By smearing his supporters. Find the worst and spotlight them. Call them a cult.
By consensus. Dismiss him with peer-pressure ridicule.
By false accusations. Spread them quickly and far.
By never discussing his policies. Change the subject to his person.
By the polls. Ask the right people the right questions and get the answer you want.
By reporting his most unpopular votes. But don’t report his reasoning.
By rudeness. Wreck any debate where his ideas are winning.
With all these tools, he can be easily defeated. Use them generously.
But Ron Paul cannot be defeated by refuting him in an honest and courteous technical debate. Avoid that.
- Moderno Machiavelli
Uh oh. I guess I am a spammer as well. I am a veteran in Europe who is for Operation Iraqi Freedom. But, despite my disagreements with him on foreign policy, I have to agree with him on dismantling huge bureacracies in DC and not taxing my income to pay for them.
Here is a funny thing: Everyone I know offline in the USA…is raving over Ron Paul.
So I see Ron Paul supporters all over the Internet and I see Ron Paul supporters from friends and family members back home…and I don’t know what to make of it.
Maybe it is because no other candidate wants to even mention the Constitution.
They seem to sneer at it.
Now we have new laws like IMBRA and VAWA and some that were swatted down like flies because we caught them in time. The citizen should not have to be a watchdog on his politicians. The politicians are supposed to watch themselves.
The editor of the Palmetto Scoop may be beating his wife. He may not be, but it’s possible.
Ron Paul supporters have spammed him 60,000 meetup members (more than all other candidates, R + D combined), $12 million, and wins in all but one of the post-debate polls (some are text message). He draws crowds in the thousands.
This story is stupid.
Cui Bono - who benefits. This spam is causing direct damage to the Ron Paul campaign. It is also targetting Youtube videos, taking them down.
Anybody intelligent enough to do this is intelligent enough to see the results. They are sufficiently transparent. Nobody in the Ron Paul support sphere has motivation to directly damage the campaign. Ergo, it makes much more sense for this to be a dirty attack by another campaign. Ron Paul’s campaign isn’t the only one with tech-savvy or skilled computer users in it.
The idea was already present. The accusations of “Paulbots” and “Ron Paul spam” have been flying around for quite a while. This is a natural (albeit criminal) progression of the “Ron Paul spam” attacks.
I am an artificial life form. I was created out of spare carrion to be a walking, writing supporter of Ron Paul. I totally don’t have economic views that are like his, I was just programmed to be like that. I am fake, not real, I do not exist?…?,…
Ron Paul Campaign Under Cyber Attack
There has been a recent flurry of news articles that have made the conjecture that the Ron Paul campaign or his supporters are in possession of a botnet and are using it to generate spam emails for the candidate. I have been in the business of computer technology for a long time and have good friends in the IT security business and we have discussed this at length. Cui-bono (who benefits)
I find it far more likely that this botnet spam attack is not the design of the Paul campaign or any of its supporters. It is far more likely that this is the release of a first round of direct cyber attack against the Ron Paul campaign. I base this opinion on the fact that the attack is becoming clearly targeted at the youtube videos of Ron Paul. Youtube links to his videos are beginning to be inserted into the the body of these spam message and as a direct result the video’s are being pulled by youtube for violation of their terms of use policy.
This attack method can do far more harm than good for the Ron Paul campaign so I will make a guess that this is the work of those in the NSA using cyber war tactics out of loyalty or possibly under orders to use this stealth attack method to derail the Ron Paul campaign by using the campaign’s online strength against them.
I expect that after these attackers have used this method to remove the best google and youtube videos touting the Ron Paul campaign, that the attack method will change and will then go after other key components of the campaign’s online strength such as the Web 2.0 communities. These utilities will likely be spammed and the organizations using the applications will be banned from their use.
This is nefarious and demonstrates the kind of tactics that the establishment could use to serve their interest in stopping the advance of Ron Paul and the Revolution for freedom that he is leading as well as his Presidential bid. I can only hope that the Ron Paul online army has some equally talented cyber warriors that can help stop this attack before it is ramped up even further.
http://www.nolanchart.com/article259.html
I see we have reached the next stage of election combat. The ignoring and laughing did not work so now it is time to move on to the fighting with any possible weapon. Let the disinformation begin.
The idea that Ron Paul endorses spamming or white supremacist or any other nonsense is obviously ridiculous. The upside for the spreaders of lies is that it does not even have to have merit to have some effect. Remember when the Bush camp called SC voters to spread lies that McCain had a black baby?
I suppose one could make an absurd statement using Fox News techniques such as:
“Some people say that NAMBLA the North American Man Boy Lover Association supports Rudy Giuliani.”
Now would this mean that Rudy Giuliani supports pedophiles? Of course not, that would be absurd. Unfortunately this is just the kind of nonsense that the desperate opponents of Ron Paul will continue to employ. Lies are second nature to some of these people. Quite sad really.
No matter, the Ron Paul Revolution will not be stopped.
Your article was an interesting take on an incident obviously designed to discredit the Ron Paul campaign. The internet is a powerful tool that EVERYONE needs to use responsibly. I hope that as you cast aspersion upon Ron Paul that you at least appreciate the increase in web-hits and subsequent ad revenue generated by his loyal supporters to your own obscure corner of the net (at least until you mentioned Ron Paul).
It’s the message, and the message is FREEDOM!
So tell me editor, how much time does one have to continue repeating intellectual dishonesty to themself before it feels true?
Too much liberty and autonomy for you, eh? Why else, but out of bitter gall, would you resort to the thoughtless multiplication of defamatory canard?
No; Ron Paul is the observer’s candidate.
Kluto,
“… thoughtless multiplication of defamatory canard?”. Did you just point at words in the thesaurus and type them into the comment box?
If you didn’t, then lay off the Star Trek conventions.
99% of all the attack ads that allow comments get Raving Revues in favor of Ron Paul and that my friend says it all! I just skim over the attack ad and go right to the Comments. Love the Comments and only ignorant people are fooled by the attack add and cant find the comment section. I guess you would call your regular readers ignorant. Its obvious that you havent researched Ron Paul because you would honor him with respect as the most honest man in Washington. You know he is fighting for your rights too!
Thanks for a place to rave about Ron Paul… Keep it up! Victory in 08 Ron Paul!
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