After months of planning, an anti-spam initiative the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls SLAM-Spam has identified over 100 major spammers and targeted 50 of them as focus points, assistant director Janna Monroe told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation May 20.
"Project SLAM-Spam is on course and on schedule to achieve substantial results against individuals and organizations that are complicit in criminal [and potentially civil] schemes where spam is used," Monroe told the committee. "As a result of these activities, more than twenty Cyber Task Forces are actively pursuing criminal and in some cases joint civil proceedings against subjects identified to date. We expect that this number will continue to rise, as successful actions are brought under this act."
Monroe said the project has also linked three groups of subjects into potential organized crime enterprises, identified over 350 resources she called misfigured and compromised by spammers including fifty government Websites, and catalogued "numerous exploits and techniques being used by spammers, including e-mail harvesting, use of viruses, and turnkey tools to bypass filters."
CAN-SPAM has critics who say the law's opt-out rather than opt-in allowance gives spammers almost unlimited pathways to crowd inboxes, but Monroe is not among them, as her testimony to the Senate panel indicated. She said CAN-SPAM gave law enforcement tools it lacked before to hit the spam problem directly, causing investigators and prosecutors to see cases based on spamming as unlikely to succeed.
"As the economic impact attributable to spam, and the use of spam to send unwanted pornographic images have become known, however, law enforcement interest increased," Monroe told the panel. "Similarly, investigations of computer intrusions and viruses have uncovered that infecting computers with viruses is now often being done to facilitate spam. In the SoBig.F computer intrusion investigation, we learned that millions of computers were infected globally, primarily to convert those computers into spam relays."
Monroe did not suggest, however, when SLAM-Spam work would provoke arrests and prosecutions. But she did say the FBI was tightening cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies, the Federal Trade Commission, and various Internet industry partners in the battle, admitting criminal enforcement is only a single tool when it comes to slamming spam.
