| Spammers hit back at anti-spam service |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Friday, 05 May 2006 | |
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The latest battle in the war between spammers and those who seek to protect against and thwart them is almost farcical, there has to be a better way. US-based Blue Security last year came up with a novel approach to deter spam: users were invited to register their email addresses with Blue Security which would then bombard the web sites of anyone sending spam to these email addresses with huge volumes of requests to unsubscribe, effectively mounting a denial of service attack on the spammer. It claims to have some 500,000 addresses registered.Spammers cannot gain details of email addresses registered with Blue Security but can wash their lists against the Blue Security list to avoid being hit with reciprocal spam. However, according to reports it appears that spammers are using this technique to gain access to some of the addresses and then targeting these addresses with additional spam, with demands to the owners to remove their addresses from the Blue Security list and with sundry other threats. The fact that spammers are targeting Blue Security and its customers in this way is, according to its CEO Eran Reshef, evidence that it works. He said in a statement. "This is just proof that the Blue Community is an effective deterrent to spammers that are using unethical and illegal tactics to promote their products and services." That would be great, except that much spam today does a lot more than promote dubious products and services: it contains malware of various kinds, and much of it comes from bot-infected Zombie computers that have no association with the perpetrator of the spam. It will also be great so long as the internet and the global cable networks that support it have adequate cheep bandwidth to handle all these spam and anti-spam messages. That won't happen for ever. The reality is that every technique to filter, block or deter the sending of spam messages is throwing out a challenge to spammers to defeat it. Thus the industry is currently locked into an upward spiral of ever more sophisticated spam and counter spam. It could largely be stopped by one very simple measure: charge for every email sent. However, that would greatly inhibit current and future legitimate uses of the Internet. There has to be a better way. {moscomment}
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