Public education, ACMA, and anti-spamming

We tip our hat to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for its relentless fight against spamming.

The ACMA is responsible for the regulation of the broadcasting, radiocommunications, internet, and telecommunications industry in Australia. With approximately 540 staff spread over its principal offices in Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney, the organisation is not small.

I have followed the activities of the ACMA during the last 18 months or so, and noted the organisation has not minced any words so to speak in making public its findings. The government watchdog has pursued its charter with no regard to whether the delinquent parties are large or small organisations.

Prior to its latest win against companies allegedly involved in SMS spamming, the ACMA has pursued separate cases against some of Australia’s large businesses. Its chairman, Mr Chris Chapman, said in relation to those cases:

“The ACMA considers that well resourced companies should be compliance leaders. There is no excuse for them to fall short in their obligations under the Spam Act for SMS marketing campaigns.”

Two months ago, the ACMA won another big case against two additional respondents who were penalised $6.5 million by the Federal Court in Brisbane for being allegedly involved in SMS spamming. The penalties were in addition to the $22 million previously imposed by the same court on five other respondents. The court’s decision in that case proved to be a landmark decision.

Last month, the ACMA again scored a win against an Australia-based international spam gang leader who was also previously found guilty of spamming by United States and New Zealand courts. The amounts awarded to the ACMA may be small compared to the big scores of the ACMA’s US counterpart, the Federal Trade Commission, nevertheless the ACMA has been proving to all and sundry that it is an organisation that takes spamming very seriously.

That said, we can see that the ACMA has well and truly covered its bases. In addition to monitoring compliance with anti-spamming and similar legislations, the ACMA also undertakes educational campaigns for sectors which are known to be non-compliant or less compliant with the Spam Act.

That’s all well and good.

There is one area though where I think the ACMA has a big fight in its hands. This is with regard to spamming carried out by global spammers. This is spamming with no boundaries, governmental or otherwise.

According to the Spamhaus Project, an independent spam monitoring organisation, the world’s number 6 spammer, Nikhil Kumar Pragji, is based in Australia. Known as the Dark Mailer for his Windows based proxy-botnet based spamware, “this spammer is responsible for and behind a large portion of the world’s illegally sent spam.”

The Spamhaus Project also reported that ISPs play a big role in the world’s fight against spamming. ISPs are the key to putting in place an effective strategy in fighting spams. And the strategy is not really that difficult to implement.

“It is surprisingly easy to ban spamming, spam services and spamware sites, as some of the biggest and best Internet ISPs and hosting firms have demonstrated by the clauses in their Acceptable Use Policies.

“All major Backbones and Tier-1 providers have a clause in their AUPs banning spamming. Most also ban the hosting of spam services and sales of spamware designed for illegal use.”

But even before implementing an AUP banning spamming, the Spamhaus also advised:

“Professional spammers will routinely try to sign up with your network, intent on abusing your facilities for as long as they can. You can avoid signing up the worst of these chronic professional spammers by checking details of suspicious customers against the ROKSO database. If they’re on ROKSO, you definitely don’t want them on your network.”

But will ISPs go this route if the prospective signups could boost their bottom line? Will they hand over that key to an effective fight strategy against spamming if that key is also the key to their bottom line?

As we raised in an earlier report, internet service providers handing over that key is wishful thinking.

But we believe the ACMA can put pressure on ISPs through public education. By public education, the ACMA could publish in its website a list of Australian ISPs who are known, or reported, to be “harbouring” spammers or ISPs that are known to have weak spam abuse control. Armed with such information, the clients of ISPs, the mobile users, email users, and internet users can put pressure on their ISPs to improve their operations, and eventually, to clean their servers of bots and other spammers tools.

Or, is this also another wishful thinking?