Escapee ‘Spam King’ dead in apparent murder-suicide

Convicted spammer Eddie Davidson, who escaped from federal prison over the weekend, killed his wife and 3-year-old daughter before killing himself in what is being described as a murder-suicide.

Colorado’s 9News.com said the tragic end of the man known as the “Spam King” was confirmed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office:

At around 11:15 a.m. Thursday, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Department received a report of shots fired in the area of East Arkansas Place.

Around the same time, according to the sheriff’s department, a female teenager arrived at a neighbor’s house with a gunshot wound to the neck. She was taken to a hospital with serious injuries.

When sheriff’s deputies arrived at the house, located in the 43000 block of East Arkansas Place, they found a dead woman and a dead man lying next to a silver Toyota Sequoia in the driveway. They also found a dead 3-year-old girl inside the SUV.

The U.S. Attorney’s office says the man, Davidson, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The U.S. Attorney’s office says Davidson’s wife and 3-year-old child were the other two who were killed and they both died from gunshot wounds.

An infant boy, about 7 to 8 months old, was found unharmed inside the back of the SUV still in a car seat. He was taken to a local hospital where he was treated for dehydration.


Davidson escaped from a minimum security prison over the weekend, prompting a manhunt by U.S. Marshals, FBI, IRS, and the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force. He reportedly escaped in a car after a visit from his wife.

The 35-year-old was sentenced in April 2008 to serve 21 months (just under 2 years) in federal prison. He was also ordered to pay $714,139 in restitution to the IRS. As part of the restitution, Davis has agreed to forfeit property he purchased, including gold coins (which the IRS is selling today), with the ill gotten proceeds of his offense.

-- From ZDNet
Ryan Naraine

Creator of Nugache Worm Reaches Plea Agreement

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service
Mon Jun 30, 12:10 PM ET



The teenage creator of a botnet who used a clever worm to infect PCs and then steal users' personal data has agreed to a plea deal with federal prosecutors in California.


Jason Michael Milmont, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, is expected to plead guilty to one count of accessing protected computers to conduct fraud.


In return, prosecutors with U.S. District Court for the Central District of California will only press for the "low end" of a potential five-year maximum sentence and US$250,000 fine, according to court documents posted the Web site of Milmont's hometown newspaper.


Milmont's scheme is perhaps most notable for the use of a P-to-P (peer-to-peer) protocol to control his botnet, a technique that makes tracing much more difficult for security analysts and law enforcement.


Milmont created what's known as the Nugache worm. He wrapped the worm into Limewire, a P-to-P file-sharing application, and duped victims into downloading the tampered program.


Once a PC was infected, the Nugache worm would then send spam to everyone on a person's AOL Instant Messenger contacts list. The spam included links to fake Web sites Milmont created mimicking MySpace or the Photobucket photo-sharing site. If a user went to the spoofed site, the user would be asked to download a file.


The file was the Nugache worm, which if downloaded and uncompressed, would then start spamming again. Prosecutors estimate that Milmont's botnet comprised 5,000 to 15,000 computers at a time. The botnet was also used to carry out denial-of-service attacks, including one against an online business in southern California.


But Milmont kept updating the malware. The third version had a keylogging function that was capable of collecting form data from Internet Explorer of the computers he controlled. He then perpetuated identity fraud, collecting credit-card numbers and ordering goods.


Milmont also bought phone numbers with Cheyenne area codes from Skype with pilfered credit-card numbers. Those numbers were used to order goods online, which went to a vacant residence in Cheyenne, federal prosecutors said.


As part of the plea deal, Milmont must pay $73,866.36 in restitution.

Cyberbullying grows bigger and meaner with photos, video

By Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY
Tue Jul 15, 6:48 AM ET



Ricky Alatorre doesn't know which classmate surreptitiously hoisted a cellphone camera and snapped his picture or exactly when it happened.


All Ricky, 16, knows is the fuzzy yet distinguishable portrait of him in English class showed up on MySpace, on a page that claimed to be his. And the fake profile, titled "The Rictionary," not only identified his school but also said Ricky loved dictionaries - a swipe at his school smarts - and was gay (he's not), one of the most common schoolyard taunts.


Tall, big and bookish, Ricky, who lives on a farm in Lake County, Ind., had been picked on since he was in kindergarten.


Insults flung in the heat of anger always inflict some pain. But words - and pictures - posted on the Internet, where they can be seen by anyone, have taken bullying to a whole new level.


"I was completely devastated," Ricky says.


As younger and more kids get their hands on cellphone and digital cameras and nearly ubiquitous high-speed Internet connections, cyberbullying is ramping up and taking new forms.


No longer are threats, taunts and insults relegated to the written word in chat rooms and instant messages. Now teens, children and sometimes adults are adding pictures and videos to their bullying arsenal and posting them on sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, where anyone can see them.


And bullying has led to real consequences - from fights to teen suicides, or what some label "bullycides." States are beginning to take action with tough new laws targeting those who use electronic means to bully.


Kids don't always report it


Online harassment of American young people ages 10 to 17 increased 50% (from 6% to 9%) from 2000 to 2005, according to the latest research available, a watershed report by the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. And the number of young people who said they had "made rude or nasty comments to someone on the Internet" increased from 14% to 28% in the same period.


But there hasn't been nearly enough research on the subject, says Corinne David-Ferdon, a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


Compounding the frustration is that children often fail to report bullying. They fear that tormentors will become angrier and bully them more or worry that if they report being bullied over the Internet or on a cellphone, their phone and Internet privileges will be revoked.


"This is an emerging public-health problem" that needs attention, David-Ferdon says. The problem gained visibility with news about high school girls getting in trouble after posting school fights on YouTube.


Five girls from Lakeland, Fla., face charges over an incident March 30 in which they are accused of participating in the beating of a 16-year-old acquaintance in retaliation for her saying nasty things about them on MySpace. They videotaped the beating and planned to post it on MySpace and YouTube, says Chip Thullbery, state attorney spokesman in Polk County.


The sheriff decided to release it to deal with news media interest, the Associated Press reported.


"Girlfight" videos have become so ubiquitous that the search term "girlfight" brings up thousands of videos on YouTube.


"You're bullied twice," says Nancy Willard, author of Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens and Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats. "You're bullied in the real world with a physical attack, and then you're bullied online with humiliation. It's very hurtful. Very, very hurtful."


The world sees what is said

In another publicized case, 13-year-old Megan Meier killed herself in 2006 after receiving devastating messages from someone masquerading as a teen boy who had developed an online relationship with her. Authorities prosecuted an adult, Lori Drew, 59, of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., on charges that she was behind the hoax. Drew pleaded not guilty last month in Los Angeles federal court.

"Cyberbullying is getting much worse, and it's affecting a lot of kids," says Bill Bond, a former principal who tours the country speaking to principals about school violence on behalf of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

"Cyberbullying can be even more destructive" than face-to-face bullying "because you get a sense that the whole world is being exposed to what is being said to you."

That's just how Ricky feels.

"When they put it on the Internet, it's like they took everything and multiplied it by an astronomical number," he says. "It's one thing if it's a mean thing that somebody put in my school paper because that's contained within a small area. Only a certain number of people will see that. But when you put it on the Internet, you are opening it up to everyone in the world."

Ricky called his mother the spring day he discovered the profile and had her pick him up from school. He didn't have many friends to begin with. But soon he found himself more alone than ever.

"I had thought about suicide," he says. "It looked very welcoming at certain times." But he says his family is helping him cope.

His mother, Peggy Alatorre, 44, tells her son he just has to make it through two more years of high school. But she's worried. "Does it hurt him forever? You bet. Ricky has been crushed."

In the past few months, Alatorre has done everything she could think of to remedy the situation. She talked to school officials. She contacted the police, the FBI, local politicians. "I even e-mailed (President) Bush."

MySpace eventually removed the profile - only after several weeks of pestering the site, she says. Other than that, "everybody is passing the buck."

Mike Chelap, assistant vice principal of Lowell High School, where Ricky attends, says he can't discuss personal matters about students, but the school began an anti-bullying program and will implement it in the fall.

Some are fighting back

Barbara Paris, now principal of Canyon Vista Middle School in Austin, became an activist against cyberbullying after a girl at another school where she worked had become suicidal after she was the victim of racial and sexual taunts online. "When … I had a child who was suicidal because of people like me not doing anything about it, I had a paradigm shift right there."

Politicians are starting to take note. Thirty-six states have anti-bullying laws, according to Paris' watchdog group, Bully Police. And several are specifically starting to address cyberbullying. On June 30, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt signed an anti-Internet harassment law in the wake of Megan Meier's death.

Also last month, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist signed the Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up for All Students Act. The tough anti-cyberbullying law came after the 2005 suicide of 15-year-old Jeffrey, who his mother says had endured three years of torturous harassment over the Internet.

To those who say bullying is just part of childhood, Jeffrey's mother, Debbie Johnston of Cape Coral, Fla., says that's "like saying rape is part of marriage."

Jodee Blanco, who grew up the victim of bullies, agrees with the sentiment. An author of two books on her own bullying experience, she now is a consultant who travels the country to talk to schools - including Ricky's.

"It's not that bullying is any worse today," she says. "The impulse for cruelty is the same impulse. The only difference is that the tools to achieve that have become more sophisticated."

But all the attention over cyberbullying is "a double-edged sword. In one respect, America is finally waking up. And yes, it's due in large part to the Internet. The flipside of that is it's also motivating a lot of kids to be meaner. Because in their minds, it is such a cool tool to show off how mean they can be."

Web networking photos come back to bite defendants

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press Writer
Sat Jul 19, 8:22 AM ET



Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled "Jail Bird."

In the age of the Internet, it might not be hard to guess what happened to those pictures: Someone posted them on the social networking site Facebook. And that offered remarkable evidence for Jay Sullivan, the prosecutor handling Lipton's drunken-driving case.

Sullivan used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.

Online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace have offered crime-solving help to detectives and become a resource for employers vetting job applicants. Now the sites are proving fruitful for prosecutors, who have used damaging Internet photos of defendants to cast doubt on their character during sentencing hearings and argue for harsher punishment.

"Social networking sites are just another way that people say things or do things that come back and haunt them," said Phil Malone, director of the cyberlaw clinic at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "The things that people say online or leave online are pretty permanent."

The pictures, when shown at sentencing, not only embarrass defendants but also can make it harder for them to convince a judge that they're remorseful or that their drunken behavior was an aberration. (Of course, the sites are also valuable for defense lawyers looking to dig up dirt to undercut the credibility of a star prosecution witness.)

Prosecutors do not appear to be scouring networking sites while preparing for every sentencing, even though telling photos of criminal defendants are sometimes available in plain sight and accessible under a person's real name. But in cases where they've had reason to suspect incriminating pictures online, or have been tipped off to a particular person's MySpace or Facebook page, the sites have yielded critical character evidence.

"It's not possible to do it in every case," said Darryl Perlin, a senior prosecutor in Santa Barbara County, Calif. "But certain cases, it does become relevant."

Perlin said he was willing to recommend probation for Lara Buys for a 2006 drunken driving crash that killed her passenger — until he thought to check her MySpace page while preparing for sentencing.

The page featured photos of Buys — taken after the crash but before sentencing — holding a glass of wine as well as joking comments about drinking. Perlin used the photos to argue for a jail sentence instead of probation, and Buys, then 22, got two years in prison.

"Pending sentencing, you should be going to (Alcoholics Anonymous), you should be in therapy, you should be in a program to learn to deal with drinking and driving," Perlin said. "She was doing nothing other than having a good old time."

Santa Barbara defense lawyer Steve Balash said the day he met his client Jessica Binkerd, a recent college graduate charged with a fatal drunken driving crash, he asked if she had a MySpace page. When she said yes, he told her to take it down because he figured it might have pictures that cast her in a bad light.

But she didn't remove the page. And right before Binkerd was sentenced in January 2007, the attorney said he was "blindsided" by a presentencing report from prosecutors that featured photos posted on MySpace after the crash.

One showed Binkerd holding a beer bottle. Others had her wearing a shirt advertising tequila and a belt bearing plastic shot glasses.

Binkerd wasn't doing anything illegal, but Balash said the photos hurt her anyway. She was given more than five years in prison, though the sentence was later shortened for unrelated reasons.

"When you take those pictures like that, it's a hell of an impact," he said.

Rhode Island prosecutors say Lipton was drunk and speeding near his school, Bryant University in Smithfield, in October 2006 when he triggered a three-car collision that left 20-year-old Jade Combies hospitalized for weeks.

Sullivan, the prosecutor, said another victim of the crash gave him copies of photographs from Lipton's Facebook page that were posted after the collision. Sullivan assembled the pictures — which were posted by someone else but accessible on Lipton's page — into a PowerPoint presentation at sentencing.

One image shows a smiling Lipton at the Halloween party, clutching cans of the energy drink Red Bull with his arm draped around a young woman in a sorority T-shirt. Above it, Sullivan rhetorically wrote, "Remorseful?"

Superior Court Judge Daniel Procaccini said the prosecutor's slide show influenced his decision to sentence Lipton.

"I did feel that gave me some indication of how that young man was feeling a short time after a near-fatal accident, that he thought it was appropriate to joke and mock about the possibility of going to prison," the judge said in an interview.

Kevin Bristow, Lipton's attorney, said the photos didn't accurately reflect his client's character or level of remorse, and made it more likely he'd get prison over probation.

"The pictures showed a kid who didn't know what to do two weeks after this accident," Bristow said, adding that Lipton wrote apologetic letters to the victim and her family and was so upset that he left college. "He didn't know how to react."

Still, he uses the incident as an example to his own teenage children to watch what they post online.

"If it shows up under your name you own it," he said, "and you better understand that people look for that stuff."

Mexican Hitmen Solicit Online

By Mike Sachoff - Mon, 07/14/2008 - 12:09pm.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/07/14/mexican-hitmen-solicit-online

Service offered for $6,000


Police in Mexico are investigating online classified ads from hitmen that offer their services for the sum of $6,000.

One post on a classified Web site, that features free ads for selling appliances and renting apartments, advertises the services of an "ex-military hitman, professional and discrete." The hitman's ad says,"job guaranteed in 10 days or less" and boasts "I have worked in Spain, only serious offers, $6,000."

The police say they are taking the online ads seriously as they continue to battle violent Mexican drug cartels and organized crime gangs. Around 1,700 people have been killed this year in gun battles with rival cartels and soldiers and federal police who are trying to end the lawlessness. Gangs frequently hire paid killers using high-caliber weapons for their hits.

"The problem of hitmen is real and we are facing it all over the country -- people offer their services to kill someone for a price," city police official Miguel Amelio Gomez was quoted as saying in the daily Reforma newspaper.

On one of the online ads, titled "Hitman Killer for Hire," says "Problems with a certain person? Want it taken care of? Write me. I am 100 percent professional and don't charge in advance."

Enterprises the battleground for social networking

Paul Krill
Mon Jul 14, 8:00 AM ET

InfoWorld

The battle to provide social networking in the enterprise is under way between solutions from established software vendors and readily available offerings such as Facebook and LinkedIn, with these sites possessing a lot of momentum, an industry insider stressed during a conference on Friday afternoon.

"It's not clear at this point which category of vendors ultimately is going to deliver more value to the enterprise," argued Antony Brydon, former CEO and founder of Visible Path, a corporate social networking startup acquired by information services company Hoover's early this year. He served on a panel session on business social networking at the Social Networking Conference in San Francisco.

IBM, he said, arguably has more employees connected to LinkedIn than to its own Lotus Connections system, Brydon said

"I think we're in a market that could end up looking a lot like the IM market," where a consumer product like AOL IM gained dominance in the enterprise, said Brydon. He added he did not take it for granted that companies such as Microsoft would dominate the business social networking space.

Multibillion-dollar social networking companies have been built covering the consumer, collegiate, and professional realms but not yet in the corporate realm, he said.

Panelist Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw, noted Jigsaw's experiences as an online provider of contact information. "Basically, it's a business card exchange," said Fowler. He emphasized both the willingness of customers to share data with Jigsaw in return for a price break and the emergence of the "information wants to be free" concept.

"I believe that we're going to move very quickly to the point where people look at it and say, information isn't the competitive advantage. It's the ability to react to the information closer to real-time," Fowler said.

Fowler cited a use of Jigsaw in which a user disappointed with DSL service support was able to find marketing contacts at the DSL vendor on Jigsaw; they then solved the problem quickly. "I think it's fascinating to watch how people use data in ways that you would never expect," Fowler said.

Also presenting at the conference was Clara Shih, creator of Faceforce, which she called "the first business application built on the Facebook platform." She also is product line manager for AppExchange at Salesforce.com.

Faceforce integrates Facebook with the Salesforce.com CRM system. Shih, who said she developed Faceforce over a weekend, stressed the trend of social applications for business, noting that workers just coming into the workforce have been used to collaborating on social networks.

"This is inevitable for business," she said.

Faceforce links with AppExchange, which is Salesforce.com's on-demand application-sharing service.

World's oldest blogger signs off singing aged 108

Mon Jul 14, 2:24 AM ET

Reuters

An Australian woman renowned as the world's oldest blogger has died at the age of 108, with her last posting talking about her ailing health but also how she still sings a happy song every day.

Olive Riley, of Woy Woy about 50 miles north of Sydney, began blogging in February last year, sharing stories from her life during the two world wars, raising three children on her own, and working as a station cook in the outback.

The physically frail but mentally alert Riley won an international audience with her blog, The Life of Riley (www.allaboutolive.com.au), and series of videos posted on YouTube with her talking and singing.

Riley was said to be the world's oldest blogger as she was 12 years older than the previous titleholder, Spain's Maria Amelia. She was born in 1899 and would have turned 109 in October.

"She enjoyed the notoriety -- it kept her mind fresh," her great-grandson Darren Stone of Brisbane told local newspapers.

"She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while."

Riley had posted more than 70 entries on her blog -- or "her blob" as she jokingly called it -- since February last year. She set up the site with the help of a friend who entered her posts for her.

In her last and 74th post (http://worldsoldestblogger.blogspot.com) on June 26 she spoke of moving into a nursing home and of her ill health, saying: "I still feel weak and can't shake off that bad cough."

She spoke about singing "a happy song" with a visitor to the home as she did every day and said she had "read a whole swag of email messages and comments from my internet friends today, and I was so pleased to hear from you. Thank you, one and all."

She died in the nursing home on Saturday.

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Miral Fahmy)

San Francisco Admin Charged With Hijacking City's Network

From Wired

SAN FRANCISCO -- A California judge on Tuesday continued the $5 million bail for a San Francisco city worker accused of hijacking the city's computer system, and ordered the network administrator to enter a plea on Thursday.

Terry Childs, 43, is accused of locking out the city from its FiberWAN network containing city e-mails, payroll, police records, information on jail inmates -- it was virtually an all access pass to City Hall. He was arrested Sunday after refusing to hand over passwords to the Wide Area Network system he is accused of taking control of illegally.

"He had the trump card and he could have brought everything down if he wanted to," said Ron Vinson, deputy director of the city's Department of Technology Information Services, who said the city's network has continued functioning without a hitch.

Erica Derryck, a spokeswoman for San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, said the defendant, who faces four felony charges of computer tampering, was a "threat to public safety."

Childs' bail was set five times higher than most murder defendants' because the authorities feared that, if released, he might permanently lock the system and erase records. "There is a real fear of that," Vinson said.


The FiberWAN network system is the major backbone of city government's computing infrastructure, connecting hundreds of different departments and buildings to a central data center, and to each other. The FiberWAN system carries more than 60 percent of the network traffic of all city government, Vinson said.

Childs has worked as a computer technician with the city for five years. He earned $126,000 in base pay last year, in addition to another $22,500 for being on-call to assist with network malfunctions.

Vinson, said the city's data system has been functioning without error since it was discovered Sunday that the city had lost control of the bulk of its network.

"We couldn't access it, but it was functioning," Vinson said. "We now have the necessary devices in place that will detect any intrusions."

Vinson said the city was working to restore total access. "Every city department uses our fiber line," he said. "We are in the process of making sure we have complete access."

He said it was "unclear" whether the defendant actually accessed or stole any data, although he had the keys.

"He created it so that he had access to the network and blocked other people from having access," Vinson said. "He created his own passwords."

Weeks ago, he said, the city was doing a threat assessment of its infrastructure and "there were some things that were suspicious from our department's standpoint."

The department figured out that the defendant allegedly "had unauthorized access to passwords of the network and he was denying access to those that were authorized," Vinson said.

He said he couldn't "speculate on any motive," but city officials said he was disgruntled, and his job was in jeopardy.

Vinson said the defendant on Sunday gave police passwords to the system, but they did not work.

Childs appeared briefly Tuesday before San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Paul Alvarado, who ordered him to enter a plea on Thursday. Childs, wearing a bright orange jail suit, did not address the court.

Outside of court, his attorney, Mark Jacobs, told reporters that Childs was "not a threat to public safety."

"He loves kittens," Jacobs quipped. "He didn't kill anybody. Murderers usually get $1 million bail."

NY man gets 30 months in prison for spamming AOL

Tue Jul 15, 5:52 PM ET

Reuters


A Brooklyn man was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Tuesday for sending spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million subscribers of America Online in a scheme that foiled the Internet company's spam-filtering system.

Adam Vitale, 27, was sentenced in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty more than a year ago to breaking anti-spam laws. He was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL in restitution.

Vitale was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails -- known as spam -- that advertised a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product's profits, prosecutors said.

"Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child's play," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Vitale as he sentenced him. Vitale earlier apologized and said he had learned a lesson.

Prosecutors said Vitale had 22 prior convictions and had also helped run an online prostitution ring on the Web site www.craigslist.com, but he has not been criminally charged.

In the spam e-mail case, Vitale and another man, Todd Moeller, defeated AOL's filter system by using several different computer servers to relay the e-mails and changed the e-mail header information to ensure the spam e-mails could not be traced back to them.

Moeller, of New Jersey, was sentenced last November to 27 months for his role in the scheme.

Court papers said that in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney, Editing by Michelle Nichols and Cynthia Osterman)