A handful of hotels in the Ottawa area have unwittingly become the instruments of e-mail spammers, who use the hotels' high-speed Internet access services to send unsolicited electronic mail touting products and services. Though such incidents have occurred across the country, it appears the trick remains rare.
Jay Swackhammer, an e-mail technologist at Nebularis Inc., an Ottawa-based Internet service provider, says he has been investigating one spammer who has booked into hotels in the Ottawa area and used in-room Internet services to send spam e-mail promotions involving government loans and financing.
Swackhammer says the individual appears to be based in Quebec and has been operating for several years. Nebularis noticed the problem a few weeks ago and began investigating.
"He'll book into a hotel for, like, a few hours, send out his stuff and then leave," Swackhammer says.
Neil Schwartzman, chairman of the board of the directors of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (CAUCE) in Montreal, says the person in question is connected with MG Publishing, a Quebec-based company that has been using unsolicited e-mail to promote its products for several years.
A Quebec-based company that operates the web site www.mgpublishing.com identifies itself on that site as Canadian Business Publishing, publisher of the Canadian Subsidies Directory. A call to the phone number listed reached a man who identified his company as Canada Books and who said he distributes the subsidies guide for MG Publishing. The man refused to answer questions concerning spam allegations.
An article on the Canadian Subsidies Directory in the National Post in August described it as having been marketed using spam and identified it as the brainchild of Michel Goyette. Goyette was quoted in another Post article in March as admitting his company sends more than 100,000 unsolicited e-mails per year.
Swackhammer says the hotel spammer has been a customer of several Ottawa-area ISPs. Schwartzman says the spammer has been "kicked off of every ISP", adding the person has used hotel networks not only in the Ottawa area, but across the country.
Among the hotels whose networks the spammer has used are a Holiday Inn in Kanata and a Fairmont resort on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, Swackhammer says.
The Holiday Inn chain and many other hotels use an Internet service called DataValet, provided by TravelNet Technologies Inc. of Montreal. Cindy Warren, director of marketing at TravelNet, says spamming from hotel rooms hasn't been a significant problem. She says TravelNet can cut off a spammer's Internet access if he or she is caught in the act, but such behaviour is hard to monitor.
A bigger concern for hotel Internet access operators at the moment, Warren says, is viruses. A guest who connects a virus-infected laptop computer to a hotel's network could theoretically introduce the virus into the network and transmit it to other guests, she says. The DataValet service has set up virus-checking facilities on its networks to prevent this, Warren says.
Schwartzman agrees sending spam from hotels has not yet become a popular trick – "it's not a particularly convenient way to send spam, moving from city to city" - but is indicative of a problem.
The unsolicited mail can be traced to the hotel from which it was sent and that could mean damage to the hotel's reputation, possible liability and potentially a loss of services for guests.
If hotels do not act to stop their networks from being used to send spam and computer viruses, he says, they could find themselves added to blacklists of spam sources. Spam-protection services and some ISPs use such lists to block all mail from locations known to tolerate spamming. A hotel being placed on such as list would mean its guests' legitimate e-mail being blocked from reaching some recipients.
If spammers can use hotel networks, Schwartzman adds, virus writers could also use the networks to release their viruses on to the Internet.
Hotels have little legal recourse, Schwartzman admits, because "we don't have laws to deal with spam in this country."
A person can be charged with intrusion into a computer system if it can be shown harm was done, but this is difficult to do if an individual sends a modest amount of spam through a hotel's network, Schwartzman says.
And law enforcement officials understandably don't view spam as their most pressing concern, he adds.
"In a world with (terrorist Osama) Bin Ladens, it has to fall lower down on the priority list."
Swackhammer says there are technical means hotels could use to prevent their networks being used for spamming, but such measures might be too draconian. Hotels could, for example, not allow outgoing e-mail from in-room connections, but that would inconvenience guests.
The Ottawa hotels Swackhammer has contacted about the problem have relatively well secured networks, only accessible to registered guests, for instance.
However, Schwartzman says hotels can take some technical steps to prevent abuse of their networks and should before the problem grows.
"They have to take immediate and serious technical action to deal with this," he says.
- by Grant Buckler
Special to the Ottawa Business Journal
