E-mail Battle with Spammers Lost By Blue Security
The Washington Post reports that, at least for Blue Security Inc, the battle against e-mail spammers has been lost.
Quote:
Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.
Threadwatch covered the "Spammers Vendeta" on this thread . The result
Quote:
Today, Reshef will wave a virtual white flag and surrender. The company will shut down this morning and its Web site will display a message informing its customers about the closure.
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"It's clear to us that
What we need is a similar organization whose users WILL sign up for that kind of thing. Blue Security was onto something with this. The trick is to get users who have the stomach to deal with the all-out war that has been started.
I do. Anyone else?
Matthew, Is it the stomach
Matthew,
Is it the stomach you need? Or the money? Seems to me that you need deep pockets to fight this sort of thing.
Blue Pussies
You don't start a war and run off crying to mommy the first time you get a bloody nose.
It saddens me to think I actually respected those spineless wimps for fighting the good fight against spam and just when it was getting interesting they roll up the carpet and go home.
Losers.
Makelovenotspam.com gave
Makelovenotspam.com gave them a lesson in how badly this approach works and it seems pretty much the whole anti-spam community gave them the same advice.
Sounds as over-funded and well thought out as the average Web 2.0. idea IMO...
From a system administrator POV I don't agree with their fight fire with fire approach. It just tends to put strain on shared resources. It's all very well you indulging in some spam vigilantism but what about all the other users in your network, ISP or server? Do they get a choice about getting caught up in the fire-fight?
BlueSecurity seemed woefully under prepared for what anyone with half a brain would see as the inevitable consequences of their actions. As Claus rightfully pointed out - Tucows DNS at $10 per year, what were they thinking?
>> woefully under
>> woefully under prepared
That much is true.
However, fighting fire with fire CAN be effective as DDoS'ing the merchants that use spam is a pretty good detterent IMO as they can't profit from the spam if their site is down in flames. So what if a few innocents get caught in the crossfire, the HOST will figure out who it was aimed at and boot their ass off the service, problem solved.
I welcomed their anti-spam efforts as it flushes the vermin out into the open so we can deal with them once and for all and end it.
Unfortunately, the wimps caved when the first serious shots were fired in retaliation.
Sad, just sad.
Always like to see Matt reading here
Goodbye Blue Frog
It's a stupid way to fight
It's a stupid way to fight spam. If I want to take out a competitor I can just promote his website with a 200 million emial mailshot. Idiot companies like this will take his website out for me.
Well....
Its true there could be some innocent casualties along the way, but remember that Blue Frog gave the culprit a warning first. If you were an innocent you could plead your case before being bombed out of existance.
Therefore, you would have to pay for 2 email campaigns to destroy a competitor ;)
I remember back in the day when NT servers had a bug where you could whack the web server with the "ping of death" which was a 65K packet that caused a buffer overflow and POOF! the server went offline. Every spam source and merchant that came in my inbox got that ping and many spammers and merchants went offline with that single ping.
Life was good and then Microsoft fixed the bug, sigh...
It still seems to me that
It still seems to me that the best way to put spammers out of business would be to charge everyone who sends an email a tenth of a cent for each email. It might be a technical problem to set up to do this, but would it not be worth the time and trouble?
//edited blatant linkdrop