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A notorious online advertiser nicknamed "the Queen of Spam" has been caught by police. The spammer was notorious with Internet users for sending trillions of unsolicited email advertisements under the bogus name "Kim Ha-na" in 2003 and 2004. The ads promoted financial services or pornographic websites. The "queen" turned out to be a 21-year-old man named Park who lived in Daegu.
¡ß Who is Kim Ha-na?
In 2003, then high school student Park developed a unique spam software that automatically gathered email addresses and sent mass emails. He sold the program to four people he met online for just W300,000 (US$1=W943) each. But the program users soon began a storm of ad emails, all using the name "Kim Ha-na". Several Internet cafes sought measures against Kim Ha-na for the spam and the Korea Information Security Agency developed a plan to tackle the problem.
It is estimated that trillions of Kim Ha-na spams were sent in 2003 and 2004. Surprised by what he had done, Park temporarily stopped developing and selling his software.
¡ß Caught after Two-Month Police Investigation
Taking a year off last spring, Park worked in a small company in Daegu to substitute his military service. In June, Park returned to the spam industry with a colleague named Kwon, developing an even more powerful program. After gaining access to 318 servers used by public and private organizations, they configured the servers as "hosts" and linked them together to distribute millions of email messages. Further, they developed a program that collected personal information from mail recipients.
Between September and December last year, as many as 1.6 billion spam messages were sent in just four months and the personal information of 12,000 people was leaked. Park earned W100 million by selling this information to private lenders.
The police began investigating Park on Nov. 28 last year. Investigators were surprised by Park's advanced techniques. He masked his IP address across thousands of websites, concealing the real email sender. Police finally tracked one of his IPs to an apartment in Daegu where they caught Park.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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