According to media reports, Microsoft has filed a 2.5 million
shekels (approximately half a million US dollars) law suit against
a man suspected of being Israel's leading spammer.
30-year-old Amir Gans is said to be responsible for sending more
than 50% of all of the spam email in Israel.
In July 2004 Gans was sued by the Israeli ISP Golden Lines for a
quarter of a million shekels (approximately US $57,300) after his
company, New Approach, allegedly sent 510,000 junk emails over 18
hours. As a result, Golden Lines says, the ISP's servers were
blacklisted by anti-spam organisations blocking legimate emails and
damaging their reputation.
Gans is a well-known figure in the Israeli internet community,
speaking often on the subject of internet privacy and direct
marketing email, and is said to readily admit to running a company
which sends bulk email.
Microsoft Israel and MSN allege that Gans's company not only
sent unsolicited adverts via email to their clients, but also
disguised the emails as coming from Hotmail Israel in an attempt to
trick recipients into opening the message.
Microsoft has asked the court to order Gans to make public
details of how many email messages his company sent to Hotmail
users, while posing as Hotmail subscribers, and to pay damages for
every message sent.
Gans has denied the charges, and filed a police complaint
alleging that Microsoft has threatened him.
"Spammers not only present a nuisance to millions of innocent
computer users around the world, they are also costing companies
money and damaging reputations," said Graham Cluley, senior
technology consultant for Sophos. "There needs to be more
international action against spammers to send out a clear message
that their behaviour will not be tolerated. No spammer should be
able to sleep in their bed at night for fear of the authorities
knocking on their door."
Sophos recommends companies protect themselves with a consolidated solution which can defend businesses
from the threats of both spam and viruses.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.