Steve Linford (born 1956) is a British anti-spam campaigner best known for founding The Spamhaus Project.[1]
Linford was born in London, England in 1956. His family moved to Rome, Italy where Steve attended Rome's St. George's British International School. After leaving college to pursue a music career, Linford made his living writing music and playing with Italian, German and English rock bands.[2] For a number of years he was under contract to Italy's 'GM' record label and worked on film music with composer Ennio Morricone[2] In the early 1980s he became involved in concert production. When artists including Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson toured Italy, Linford served as their Production Director.[2]
As computers began to be used in the music industry, Linford was drawn to computing. In 1986 he moved to England where he set up a software company called Ultradesign Technology, whose flagship product for many years was a file-searching program called UltraFind for the Macintosh similar to, but predating by many years, Apple's Sherlock.[2] With the rise of the internet Linford refocused the company in 1996 as an internet technologies company called Ultradesign Internet, around which he built a server hosting network called UXN.
Finding that his customers were being harassed with junk emails, he sought ways to stop the problem and in doing so he became an anti-spam campaigner. In 1998 he founded Spamhaus.
With the support of the internet's major networks, Spamhaus began blocking billions of spam emails from reaching internet users and this activity made Linford a target for cyber-criminals whose spam operations were increasingly crippled by Spamhaus. He received many death threats from criminal spam gangs around the world, many of which were posted online.[3]
Today his project's DNSBLs are used by an estimated two-thirds of the world's Internet networks and collectively serve over 1.4 billion email users.[1]
In 2005 Linford left England to return to the Mediterranean and today lives in Monaco. He is currently CEO of the Spamhaus organization which, now based nearby in Geneva, Switzerland, continues to be the driving force behind spam filter technology and anti-spam legislation and helps keep email usable for the rest of us.[1]
In 2003 the New York Times dedicated the front page of its Business section to an article about Steve Linford.[4] Since then he has regularly spoken on spam and security at government hearings, the European Parliament and the UN.[1] In 2003 he was named as one of the technical industry's 'Top 50 Agenda Setters' by Silicon Magazine.[5] In 2004 he was given the Internet Hero Award by the British ISP Association ISPA.[6] In 2005 he was nominated for Outstanding Contribution to the UK Technology Industry.[7]