The Oblivious Accomplices

There will be no subpoenas, hearings, or trials, and none of us will be charged with a crime - although we may have just committed one. The story of "The King of Spam" Oleg Nikolaenko comes to us from NPR's American Public Media (APM) podcast named Future Tense. Nikolaenko, who received his nickname soon after he went into the spam business, has been recently arrested by federal authorities in connection with the violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. More simply, Nikolaenko is accused of generating of over one-third of the world digital spam, for profit, of course, through a massive "botnet" network referred to as "Mega D." Thousands of computers were supposedly hacked and made to "carry out the spamming, unbeknownst to [their] owner[s]." These computers are located all over the world, so theoretically, the ones you and I are using now could be affected, so technically, we could partly responsible for the crime too. Too bad, there is nothing we can do about that, as the hackers made sure to exploit only low-level processing capacities and other small-scale unused computing functionality using very efficient, stealthy software, which means that average users will have a very hard time detecting the hack. In fact, unless you are a very experienced programmer and computer scientists who knows where to look, you won't be able to find the problem. So, whatever Oleg Nikolaenko allegedly did to our computers will probably stay with our computers for a while longer, which brings us to the bad news - spam will stick around. However, there are some good news as well, per Patrick Peterson, Cisco fellow and chief security researcher, "It's important to realize that in some of these cases, the arrests may seem more like petty crimes done on a massive scale. These are the same techniques used to infect our government computers by foreign state actors, used for industrial espionage, used to infect our accountants and people in finance to empty out bank accounts. So, every botnet that gets shut down doesn't just mean less spam in our inbox, it also means a lot less other more damaging crimes will not be committed." From now, Oleg Nikolaenko is in custody, which means we are one step closer to a more secure internet.