I have started hearing about the Blue Frog, which seems to fight back against spammers by sending mass unsubscribe requests and to their sites for every piece of spam they send, which should hurt the spammers by: 1 increasing their bandwidth charges, 2: cause them to sort through these requests and legitimate request for penis enlarging drugs 3: basically cause a DDoS attack on the spammers web site blocking real sales.
It seems to be hurting the spammers. So much so that the spammers have launched a counter attack. First, they hit Bluefrog with a DOS attack last week. Next, they apparently have found a way to intercept the spam reports sent by users, harvest those email addresses, and bomb the users with even more spam.
This has the potential to grow exponentially and become a real issue.
Spammers are like trolls. The only options are either to not feed them, or wait for a big billy goat to come and butt them where it hurts.
Never interact with spammers, it only encourages them!
Because they have to pay for theirs, even if they are using zombie computers to spam, they still need to have some way to sell their crap, which should be attackable. Even this nice gentleman who keeps emailing me about a deal in argentina or something needs some sort of attackable address.
I think dDOS attacks are illegal in most places, are they not? I know it’s tempting to try to hit back at the spammers this way, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
You have to add your email addresses to a ‘do not disturb’ list that will be freely available foor anyone to download; the idea is that they’re supposed to delete matching addresses from their mailing lists. I just don’t see that happening; waving a big list of valid email addresses under the nose of a spammer is going to be too tempting, isn’t it?
I still like the idea of some Russian Mafia boss checking his email and thinking “What? He thinks my penis is small? Have him killed.” It would take care of the problem in a hurry.
Perhaps, but people who sign up for this seem to be the type not to buy from spammers, and for every email you set up Blue Frog creates 4 dummy emails addresses. So that list only has 1/5 valid email addresses, and the emailers will fight back.
The typical spammer spits out millions of e-mails a day. It seems to me that taking revenge on a spammer would be like throwing a rock at a 4-axle dump truck.
Not even close. If national governments can’t crack this, I doubt a software program will.
You are kidding, right? Or are you not aware that spammers often find it cost-effective and profitable to pick a domain and randomly generate every single possible email-address at that domain up to six or eight letters in lenght, just on the off-chance that a handful of emails might arrive? Spammers send out BILLIONS of emails on the expectation that maybe 0.0001% generate a few pennies. A list of email addresses where 20% are valid, active accounts is probably something a spammer would pay tens of thousands of dollars for - by their standards it’s targeted mailing.
Well those 20% valid email addresses, if each of the blue frog members takes a counter assult will result in a counterassult of all 100% email addresses. Spammers do it to make money, it appears that blue froggers? would not be a cost effective target for spam as they are less likely to buy and they are more likely to try to cost the spammer money.
It worked to radically change the way music is sold.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see this working. The economics still favour the spammers, especially since the application seems to be pretty dumb - it just tries to fill out any webforms on the target site, so can presumably be fooled by javascript or a simple ‘click here to buy your viagra’ imagemap.
Plus which, there is apparently nothing to stop people sending out spam with a totally unrelated URL in it and then chuckling in the corner as bluefrog tries to DDOS the White House, the FBI or some random other peddler of internet crap. Or if they have a sense of humour, a ‘we want reading spam made compulsory’ online petition.
Maybe if they hooked the reporting engine up to a filtering service, but DDOS-ing using a dumb mechanism isn’t very clever. Remember the Lycos screensaver that did something similar to this a few years ago? That went nowhere too.
Holy crap, it seems they indeed playing netwar. :smack:
Blue Security who run Blue Frog have apparently dissolved rather than risk any more internet users being caught in the crossfire between Blue and some psycho russian spammer. Damn - time for Hollywood to make The Net 2: Spam Games
