Month: December 2020

Enlarge / The federal courthouse in Las Vegas, where Wallace was questioned about his money. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Update, 12/28/20: It's the year end holiday season, and much of Ars staff is still enjoying some necessary downtime. While that happens, we're resurfacing some classic Ars stories like this 2013 excerpt from The Internet Police, Deputy Editor Nate Anderson's look at how the Internet changed the game for criminals and law enforcement (now available in paperback!). This piece on bringing down junk email king Spamford Wallace first published on December 22, 2013, and it appears unchanged below.

On a warm April morning in 2007, one of the world’s most notorious spammers walked through the doors of the Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse in Las Vegas. Though the Federal Trade Commission was attempting to collect a $4 million judgment against him, Sanford “Spamford” Wallace showed up to his sworn deposition without a lawyer—and without any of the documents required of him.

Wallace, though nominally cooperative, had been nearly impossible to reach. When attorneys from the social network MySpace had sued him weeks before, the process server tasked with delivering legal documents couldn’t make contact with Wallace and eventually went to the OPM Nightclub where Wallace worked weekends as a $400-a-week disc jockey under the name “DJ MasterWeb.” The process server claimed to have approached Wallace at the club before being intercepted by security guards; the lawsuit papers were literally thrown at Wallace in an attempt to get good service on him.

Enlarge / Some common types of drinking water pipes: Black plastic is HDPE; white is PVC; yellow is CPVC; red, maroon, orange, and blue are PEX; green is PP; and gray is polybutylene. The metal pipes are lead, iron and copper. (credit: Andrew Whelton/Purdue University, CC BY-ND )

When wildfires swept through the hills near Santa Cruz, California, in 2020, they released toxic chemicals into the water supplies of at least two communities. One sample found benzene, a carcinogen, at 40 times the state’s drinking water standard.

Our testing has now confirmed a source of these chemicals, and it’s clear that wildfires aren’t the only blazes that put drinking water systems at risk.

In a new study, we heated plastic water pipes commonly used in buildings and water systems to test how they would respond to nearby fires.

Enlarge (credit: Traitov | Getty Images)

2020 was a tough year for a lot of reasons, not least of which were breaches and hacks that visited pain on end users, customers, and the organizations that were targeted. The ransomware menace dominated headlines, with an endless stream of compromises hitting schools, governments, and private companies as criminals demanded ransoms in the millions of dollars. There was a steady stream of data breaches as well. Several mass account takeovers made appearances, too.

What follows are some of the highlights. For good measure, we’re also throwing in a couple notable hacks that, while not actively used in the wild, were impressive beyond measure or pushed the boundaries of security.

The SolarWinds hack

2020 saved the most devastating breach for last. Hackers that multiple public officials say are backed by the Russian government started by compromising the software distribution system of SolarWinds, the maker of network monitoring software that tens of thousands of organizations use. The hackers then used their position to deliver a backdoored update to about 18,000 customers. From there, the hackers had the ability to steal, destroy, or modify data on the networks of any of those customers.