Part of what the SEC dubbed as "Operation Spamalot," today's action was applauded by Paul Henry, the vice president of technology evangelism at Secure Computing. "This has been a long time coming. We've been tracking roughly 600 stock symbols associated with pump-and-dump spam in the last year, and these 35 are the most massively-spammed of them all. The SEC got this right."

In its suspension order (download PDF), the SEC said that "questions have arisen regarding the adequacy and accuracy of publicly disseminated information" about the 35 companies' assets, operations and financial status.

"Pump-and-dump doesn't only clog up e-mail inboxes, but it cheats the gullible and greedy," said Henry.

The SEC estimated that as many as 100 million of these spam messages cross the Internet every week.