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September 30, 2005

Brendan Battles, ex-spammer

Another longtime spam king has apparently gone out of business. In recent weeks, Florida spammer Brendan Battles was quietly removed from the Spamhaus Register of Known Spam Operations.

The 34-year-old Battles had been listed on ROKSO since the database's inception in 2000. Head of Coral Springs-based DataCom Marketing Corp. and Image Marketing Group Online, Inc., Battles reportedly sent up to 50 million spams per day for things like subliminal weight loss tapes. Battles also used spam to advertise CD-ROMs containing millions of email addresses, including one called Master Disk (aka Max Disc).

While it may not be as notable as the recent ROSKO de-listing of Scott Richter, Battles' exit from the spam business is significant.

Like Richter, Battles regularly tangled with anti-spammers. In early 2003, Spamhaus director Steve Linford blamed Battles for a 2003 joe-job attack on SpamCop and Spamhaus. A flurry of spam was forged with the signature, "Steve Linford - God of the Internet."

In late March 2003, to prevent Battles from "abusing open proxies on Cox," Spamhaus temporarily blacklisted a swath of Internet protocol addresses owned by cable-Internet provider Cox Communications.

Shiksaa, the heroine of Spam Kings, published AIM log files of some of her first online conversations with Battles. She and other anti-spammers later blamed Battles for being involved in a (failed) 2003 lawsuit against her and several other high-profile anti-spammers.

Somehow, the mega-spammer managed to elude lawsuits. He was nicked with a joint lawsuit by Earthlink and CIS Internet in 2001. But a judge dismissed the case after more than six months passed "without any substantial proceedings."

Although his ROKSO record is gone, Battles is still listed on the Spews.org blacklist. He made no secret of his distaste for Spews. At one point in 2003, he configured his datacommarketing.com site so it would re-direct visitors to AntiSPEWS.org, a site that tried to persuade system administrators not to use the controversial blacklist.

Posted by brian at September 30, 2005 10:40 AM