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I recently heard of a really cleaver scheme
to reduce the amount of spam that we all receive. The idea is very simple. One
of the irritating things about spam is that the sender is nearly always hidden
because the headers that contain that information are forged and refer to an
innocent third party. However, the advertiser, the one causing the spam, has to
give a real email or web address otherwise how could they get any benefit from
the spam.
Eran Reshef founded a company, Blue
Security, which simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk email to his
clients. But, because those sorts of request tend to get ignored, Blue
Security, then bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its
customers at the same time.
Essentially, fighting spam with spam. It
worked too. Some spammers complied and Blue Security customers found the amount
of spam that they received fell significantly, some by as much as 35%.
Then, in early May, a Russia-based spammer
counterattacked. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, the spammer flooded
Blue Security with so much Internet traffic that it brought the site down as
well as blocking other sites. The spammer also sent threatening emails to Blue
Security customers.
After something like ten days of continuous
attack Blue Security has shut down. Reshef concluded that quitting would be the
only thing to prevent a full scale cyber-war which he didn't feel he had the
authority to start, observing that: "Our users never signed up to for that kind
of thing."
Well, it goes to show just how powerful the
malicious denizens of the Internet can be.
Whether, or not, Blue Security had a lousy idea
or a great idea I suspect we will never know.
Sigh.
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