Spam Wars
Last week I recognized a radical increase of spam appearing in my corporate mailbox. DIdn't think much about that because Thunderbird did a nice job on filtering them out of my regular mail. Just one mail slipped through and because I'm natural curious I took a peek inside. The text caught a thought because it was a threat that when I didn't sign out of BlueFrog I'd get 40 times as much spam as currently.
Yes, I'm participating in Blue Security's attempt to stop spammers by automatically filling out their advertised forms and visiting their pages without producing any real value which renders their business rather useless. It's not that ethical to intentionally hit someone with a quasi-DoS attack but then the targets aren't thinking about ethical stuff either.
"Well," I thought "there you go..." and marked it as spam.
Then yesterday I read about some problems around in parts of the internet and a security company involved in it. A quick search turned up that Blue Security had been under a DDoS attack which somehow had been redirected to affect SixApart and Tucows. The former is hosting blogs of thousands of users and the latter is a major DNS provider. There is some inconsictency in the statements issued by Blue Security and the other victims but you can read more about that on the LOOSE wire blog - The Blue Frog vs. PharmaMaster, The Red-faced Blue Frog and CIO Online - Antispan firm says it was victim of attack. A timeline of the events and the messages from the attacker are listed on Blue Security's page.
I'm impressed. On the one side because a spammer fears so much about it's business that he personally threatens the company responsible for his problems and on the other side how much harm an individual can cause if it unleashes the powers of an obviously impressive botnet as (hopefully) last ressort. I'm unsure how people will react to this recent activities. Perhaps it will aid Blue Security's attempts to stop spammers but perhaps Blue Security's actions scared away the people. I hope for the former. Perhaps in the future we'll even have to expect some more outages around the internet when the "Spam War" is heating up.
Going back to train my Thunderbird junkfilter...