Andre Yoskowitz
19 Jun 2010 11:54
Microsoft has filed suit against a group of spammers this week, accusing them of one of the "largest" spam attacks against Windows Hotmail, ever.
Making the case more insulting to Microsoft, was the fact that the spammers used Microsoft's anti-spam filtering technologies to start the spam campaign.
"The lawsuit ... alleges [the] defendants engaged in an elaborate scheme to evade Microsoft's filters by abusing Microsoft's Junk E-Mail Reporting Program (JMRP) and Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) to send vast quantities of spam each day," says John Scarrow, general manager of safety services for Microsoft.
The SNDS and JMRP features are free services for Hotmail users that want to report spam that breaks through filters.
As a way to get around the anti-spam filters, Microsoft says the defendants hired hundreds of people to open millions of Hotmail accounts, who then were sent the spam, and manually misidentified them as valid e-mails, thus destroying the accuracy of the filters.
"We take this abuse very seriously, and while Hotmail and our SmartScreen filter continue to work to block spam from this identified scheme, we'll keep investigating and pursuing spam attacks to protect our network and our customers," Scarrow added.