Spammers River City Media leak their own database, full of confidential information

River City Media (RCM) dedicated years to collecting confidential information from millions of Internet users. The company poses as a marketing professional, but its plans include much more than coming up with best ways to promote products. This was revealed thanks to Chris Vickery, an employee of MacKeeper. Thanks to a lucky accident back in January, Vickery detected a cluster of information that contained more than 1.30 billion of confidential details. Why is he only reporting his discovery now? Well, the information had to be analyzed to determine which facility might have suffered from data breach. The situation turned out to be quite different: River City Media mastered a multitude of tricks to distribute spam and got away with it. Until now, that is.

The secretive activity of River City Media allowed it to collect tons of information about users’ email addresses, actual home addresses, names, IP addresses and etc. The spamming operations were quite successfully concealed from the public eye as RCM managed to apply different strategies for bypassing restrictions that spam faces. Even though they were victorious in putting up a play for the society to see, one mistake might cost it all.

RCM collected so much information during its spamming operations that it had a very strong upper hand. Now, certain authorities will shake this company good. But how did the collected material end up in the sight of Chris Vickery? The database was accidentally leaked by RCM itself, leaving an open repository for the researcher to detect. After investigating the detected leakage, it was determined that the information was collected by RCM spammers.

However, a few people seem to be blamed for the “unfortunate” leakage of information that RCM would have favored to keep behind closed doors. Matt Ferris and Alvin Slocombe were the two people who destroyed the great empire of spammers. They disclosed a multitude of records, accounting details, infrastructure planning and production notes, scripts, affiliations. And, of course, over 1.30 billion of confidential details. Email addresses that were detected in the vulnerable database were the ones that had received spam from River City Media. With the amount of detected emails, it is possible that even you might have been a victim of a grant spamming operation.

Long story short, River City Media messed and that will cost them their reputation. In fact, they will presumably catch the attention of certain authorities that will surely be interested in the spamming operations RCM had initiated over the years. We are guessing that the company is going to get roasted pretty bad. However, mistakes that scammers make are in favor of cybersecurity. Let’s hope that hackers will fail more frequently and reveal their entire plans to the world.

Source: betanews.com.