Spammergate: The Fall of an Empire

WildByDesign · Mar 6, 2017

Spammergate: The Fall of an Empire
By Chris Vickery
06 / 03 / 2017
Source: https://mackeeper.com/blog/post/339-spammergate-the-fall-of-an-empire

This article is the follow up to the following tweet:

1.4 billion identity leak story incoming Monday morning. Thanks go to @SteveD3 (and someone else) for cooperating on investigation.
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Source: https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/837795748309655552

Today we release details on the innerworkings of a massive, illegal spam operation. The situation presents a tangible threat to online privacy and security as it involves a database of 1.4 billion email accounts combined with real names, user IP addresses, and often physical address. Chances are that you, or at least someone you know, is affected.

A cooperative team of investigators from the MacKeeper Security Research Center, CSOOnline, and Spamhaus came together in January after I stumbled upon a suspicious, yet publicly exposed, collection of files. Someone had forgotten to put a password on this repository and, as a result, one of the biggest spam empires is now falling.

Additional coverage can be seen over at CSOOnline.

The leaky files, it turns out, represent the backbone operations of a group calling themselves River City Media (RCM). Led by known spammers Alvin Slocombe and Matt Ferris, RCM masquerades as a legitimate marketing firm while, per their own documentation, being responsible for up to a billion daily email sends.
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Spammers expose their entire operation through bad backups
By Steve Ragan
Faulty Rsync setup exposes River City Media's entire operation, group is one of Spamhaus' top offenders
Source: http://www.csoonline.com/article/31...eir-entire-operation-through-bad-backups.html

This is the story of how River City Media (RCM), Alvin Slocombe, and Matt Ferris, accidentally exposed their entire operation to the public after failing to properly configure their Rsync backups.

The data from this well-known, but slippery spamming operation, was discovered by Chris Vickery, a security researcher for MacKeeper and shared with Salted Hash, Spamhaus, as well as relevant law enforcement agencies.

While security practitioners are familiar with spammers and their methods, this story afforded Salted Hash with a rare opportunity to look behind the curtain and view their day-to-day operations.
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Minimalist · Mar 6, 2017

It says that LE has been notified about his. I hope that they (and judge also) will do something about it.

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