Habeas, the company known for putting copyrighted haikus in legitimate email to distinguish it from spam, says it has come under attack from an as yet unidentified spammer. The spammer is illegally using the Habeas Warrant Mark in emails which are promoting websites such as pharmawarehouse.biz, pharmacourt.biz and valuepointmeds.biz. The attack began about a week ago at about 11am PT. Complaints are returning to Habeas.

In the trade, such a forgery is called a Joe Job (and here's why).

Habeas says it is aggressively trying to stop '"his illegal mailstream" and will punish the responsible spammer for copyright and trademark violation. "We are tracking down the identity of the spammer for further action. We've stopped spammers before and now we'll do it again," says Des Cahill, Habeas CEO, in a statement.

The spam attack appears to be originating from a distributed set of zombie cable and DSL modems that someone likely took over in a past virus attack. Habeas says it has begun systematically adding the IP addresses of the hundreds of compromised PCs sending this spam to the Habeas Infringers List (HIL). "This spammer has made a poor choice in infringing the Habeas Warrant Mark," the company says.

Maybe Habeas should have a look at the three sparmvertised sites first, whose domain names were all registered by the same person from the Philippines. The China based domain server (NS1.SESSIONROAD.BIZ.DELETED.GNADI.BIZ) also hosts another familiar pills peddler Pharmacy Online.

As with most dubious and often unlicensed online pharmacies, none of these affiliate sites contain a postal address, only a free US 1-800 number. As from Monday, two of the spamvertised websites are defaced by antispammers. ®

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