Fighting Spam on the Home Front

Saint Aardvark writes: "Something interesting from the SecurityFocus Honeypot mailing list: a couple of honeypots for spammers. This message has a link to a how-to page for setting up a Sendmail honeypot to trap spammers, and the status page for a honeypot in Moscow that's trapped spam meant for >1.7 million recipients. The author mentions using a honeypot in conjunction with the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse -- this seems like a great way identify both spammers and their messages."

And C-Moan writes: "Wireless spam volume is likely to increase in the coming years. But smart use of spam-fighting measures can go a long way toward eliminating the problem. This article provides info about the latest crop of e-mail filters and enhanced mail client options, as well as two roll-your-own programming platforms that could help keep your in-boxes spam free."

Comments

most effective

[TheSHAD0W]

The most effective solution for fighting spam is NOT legal; it is also not honeypots, or open server bans. It's community action.

Did you receive a spam directing you to a website? Good. Surf there. Reload. Reload a few hundred times. 800 number? Call it and complain. When they hang up on you, call back.

Multiply this by even a small fraction of the people the company sent spam to and swamp their lines and slashdot their servers. They won't be making any sales, and any earnings they do make won't come close to paying their bandwidth or phone bills.

Re:What am I missing?

[GeorgeH]

(2) Spammer sees .01% response rate drop to .0000001% response rate (finding open relays, spidering email addresses, etc). Looks at books and sees that he spent 10 hours getting everything together to spam. Additionally, he spends 30 hours dealing with people who call pretending to be interested, keep him on the line, and then say that their credit card number is "spammers suck." So he spent 40 hours and only sold one widget, that he gets a $5 profit on. Realizes that he could have made more money working 40 hours at Mcdonalds, and there are nicer customers to boot.

The reason people spam is the cost is low. Increase the cost of doing business and they will reevaluate.

Re:What's funny is...

[Binestar]

2) at times HTML emails contain images located on a server. This allows them to track if a message has been read and which message.

This is exactly that, most HTML e-mail messages you get contain an image. Alot of those images are formatted in such a way like:

img src="http://www.spammersite.com/spampic.jpg?you@yo urisp.com"

So the image display's, and they now have a list of e-mail addresses of people who looked at the message.

So now you don't even have to click anything, they know you are looking at the message just by your mail client opening the picture.

Hmmm

[NiftyNews]

This isn't flamebait, but what is the point of doing all of this?

So now the spammers have a lot of worthless addresses. Well let's think about that for a minute. Spam is built around a theory that next-to-no-one will reply anyway, so that doesn't matter much. Spammers also rarely pay for their own bandwidth, choosing instead to spoof unsecure machines to do their dirtywork. So in the long run, you only end up giving them more worthless addresses that creates more wasted bandwidth, neither of which really harms the people you are attempting to target.