When the Spam King, sometimes known as Sanford Wallace, got kicked in the teeth with $711.2 million USD in damages, some said this would send a clear message to others following on the same path. Will it really? Will an order from the courts, to a man who has already filed bankruptcy, to pay hundreds of millions in damages, matter in the slightest?
Facebook settlement means little in the long run.
“Unfortunately, I don't think the settlement will do much to persuade people to steer clear of this kind of activity,” said Chris Boyd, Director of Malware Research for FaceTime. “If Sanford didn't actually have seven billion dollars to hand [over] (the amount Facebook originally asked for), and they themselves state ‘While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award,’ in relation to the $711 million dollars they ended up with - is that really going to have these people quaking in their boots? How would they obtain similar damages if (say) someone was running a Sanford style operation out of Eastern Europe or even further afield?”
We asked Boyd his thoughts on how it was that Wallace able to access the accounts to Spam others.
“His technique in relation to Facebook seems to have involved rather straightforward Phishing pages, then using those compromised accounts to post Spam messages to Facebook walls. Previously he was fined 4 million by the FTC for dumping rogue antispyware onto desktops - and yet he continued to ply his trade across MySpace and Facebook with his Phishing activities. Clearly, the "threat" of these large fines hasn't acted as much of a deterrent so far.”
Indeed, Facebook said they hoped this latest monetary award would serve as a deterrent against “these criminals”. However, it obviously didn’t work out that way. Facebook will see very little, if any money from the judgment. They know this. Yet, as long as Spam and Phishing work, why would these cases matter in the slightest to the criminals behind them?
Considering Facebook has been in the news a lot lately thanks to scams, rogue applications, and Malware. Is this just an example of criminals taking the low hanging fruit thanks to the sheer number of users?
“It seems scammers and spammers have (to some degree) jumped ship from MySpace and attempted to keep themselves busy with Facebook,” Boyd said.
“Facebook has so many interesting little niche areas (such as walls, applications and the wealth of personal information that people place there in comparison with other Social Networking sites) that there is plenty of room for exploitation and the sheer volume of users ensures that if you cast your net for long enough, you're bound to reel in a nice catch of logins and personal data. The "low hanging fruit" is most definitely a hot target on Facebook right now.”
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