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Presidential candidate denies involvement in spam campaign

by on07 December 2007

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Says a one-armed man did it


Security
firm SecureWorks said that spam sent endorsing a U.S. Republican Presidential candidate was sent on a Reactor botnet controlled by a commercial spammer in the U.S.

SecureWorks looked at the headers of the Ron Paul campaign e-mails and traced them back to zombie systems that were infected with the Srizbi trojan. The researchers collaborated with Spamhaus to get the server shut down, and then obtained the source code used on the control system, a Python-based spam botnet management tool known as the Reactor Mailer.

It appears that the Ron Paul spam was transmitted by a spammer called nenastnyj, who operated a single node in a co-location facility and was likely affiliated with or renting access from the Reactor syndicate.

Paul has denied his campaign was involved in the spam campaign.
Last modified on 10 December 2007
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