Spamhaus Uses Court Filing To Connect Dots On Anonymous e360 Netblock

Spamhaus, the London-based operator of the Spamhaus block list (SBL), today released an incident report concerning their listing of 71.5.99.0/25 (SBL52363) as well as a related block ( see SBL51828). These two Spamhaus listings are significant because the two blocks were anonymous until their owner, e360 Insight, used the courts to request that Spamhaus unblock them.

e360 Insight obtained a judgement from an Illinois judge in September, 2006 forcing Spamhaus to remove from Spamhaus’ block lists, at e360’s request, any IP blocks owned by e360. It’s ironic that e360 requested the removal of the blocks described in SBL52363 and SBL51828 because these blocks have been shown by Spamhaus to be sources of spam, in contravention of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. In other words, the spammers have tried to use the courts to their advantage, but have instead succeeded in having their own spamming activities validated as such.

From the incident report:

Nothing in the IP address registration, domain registrations, nor even in the spam sample itself, even remotely showed any connection with e360 Insight or David

Linhardt. At the time of creating the record it was technically impossible for

Spamhaus to know that the IP range the spam was coming from and these domains were owned by David Linhardt.

Only when the Plaintiff’s counsel sent Spamhaus’ counsel a demand for SBL record
SBL52363 to be removed, claiming it was in violation of Judge Kocoras’ order to
never list David Linhardt’s domains or IPs, did Spamhaus then know that SBL52363
and therefore the 80 anonymous domains and IP range belonged to David Linhardt.

In effect, e360 Insight has held up their hand and acknowledged through the courts that they are spammers! For more background on e360 Insight, read the Spamhaus entry at Wikipedia.