*You've likely never heard of these banks, but they profit by your suffering.
via SANS
–Hit Spammers at Their Payment Processors
(May 25, 2011)
Nearly all financial transactions arising from spam operations are
handled by just three banks, according to a paper from 15 researchers
from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of
California at San Diego, the International Computer Science Institute
and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The paper,
which "follows the money" from spam around the world, is scheduled to
be delivered next week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
2011. The researchers gathered real spam data and made more than 100
purchases from the sites the messages led to. The three banks are
Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, DnB NOR in Latvia, and St.
Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank in the Caribbean. As potential
solutions, the researchers recommend that issuing banks in the US refuse
to conduct "card not present" transactions for known spammers.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/client/229625599
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/052511-want-to-stop-junk-email.html
[Editor's Note (Schultz): This is one of the most interesting
information security research efforts in recent years.
(Honan): This is a very interesting development in the fight against
spam. While changing hosting providers is a trivial matter for spam
operators changing their payment processor is not easy making it more
time consuming and costly for spammers to conduct their operations.
Should enough of these payment processors be identified and blacklisted
it could have a major impact in the amount of spam flooding our
networks.]
