San Fracisco : Daniel Balsam hates spam. Most everybody does, of course. But he has acted on his hate as few have, going far beyond simply hitting the delete button. He sues them.

Eight years ago, Balsam was working as a marketer when he received one too many e-mail pitches to enlarge his breasts.

Enraged, he launched a Web site called Danhatesspam.com, quit a career in marketing to go to law school and is making a decent living suing companies who flood his e-mail inboxes with offers of cheap drugs, free sex and unbelievable vacations.

“I feel like I’m doing a little bit of good cleaning up the Internet,” Balsam said.

From San Francisco Superior Court small claims court to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Balsam, based in San Francisco, has filed many lawsuits, including dozens before he graduated law school in 2008, against e-mail marketers he says violate anti-spamming laws.

His many victories are mere rain drops in the ocean considering that Cisco Systems Inc. estimates that there are 200 billion spam messages circulating a day, accounting for 90 percent of all e-mail.

Still, Balsam settles enough lawsuits and collects enough from judgments to make a living. He has racked up well in excess of $1 million in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies accused of sending illegal spam.

His courtroom foes contend that Balsam is one of many sole practitioners unfairly exploiting anti-spam sentiments and laws. They accuse him of filing lawsuits against out-of-state companies that would rather pay a small settlement than expend the resources to fight the legal claims.

By Paul Elias
Associated Press – Seatle Post-Intelligencer

A fast-moving email worm that began spreading on Thursday has been able to affect hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide, anti-virus provider Symantec warned.

The email arrives with the subject “Here you have.” An executable screensaver that’s disguised as a PDF document then tries to send the same message to everyone listed in the recipient’s address book. The .scr file is a variation of the W32.Imsolk.A@mm worm Symantec discovered last month.

In addition to spreading through email, it can propagate through mapped drives, autorun and instant messenger. It also has the ability to disable various security programs.

The worm is a throwback to attacks not seen in almost a decade, when the Anna Kournikova and I Love You attacks wreaked havoc on email systems worldwide. The Here You Go worm appears to different in that the malicious payload is downloaded from a page on members.multimania.com, rather than being attached to the email. That could make efforts to eradicate the worm easier.

Then again, McAfee said multiple variants of the worm appear to be spreading, so it’s not yet clear that the malicious screensaver is hosted by a single source.

Source: The Register
More Info: New Round of Email Worm, “Here you have”