Anti-spammer fined $60K for DNS lookup 'hack'

towaz writes: "Noticed this while doing my usual trauling of websites, It appears David Ritz, the veteran American spam-fighter, has been hit by $60,000 in fines plus lawyers fees after losing a civil suit that accused him of illegal hacking. The complaint alleged that Ritz "hacked" servers owned by Sierra (which describes itself as a specialist web hosting and internet services firm), obtaining confidential internal network configuration data (using a zone transfer, host -l command) and domain name information (using whois) before publishing that data on the net. This doesn't sound like a good trend and I stongly urge those who have to deal with the 90% (higher now?) spam to mail ratio to donate or help any way they can with this. The story is at theregister.com http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/17/anti_spam_activist_lawsuit/ Or due to the great style of journalism you may want to skip this and go direct to the Donate page. http://sfldf.org/donations.html or check Falk and Reynolds site found here http://www.rahul.net/falk/Nz/lawsuit.html#background"