IBM Unveils Anti-Spam Services to Stop Spammers

bblazer writes "CNN Money is running a story about a new IBM service that spams the spammers. The idea behind the technology is that when a spam email is received, it is immediately sent back to the originating computer - not an email account. From the article, ""We're doing it to shut this guy down," Stuart McIrvine, IBM's director of corporate security strategy, told the paper. "Every time he tries to send, he gets slammed again."""

Comments

Here is how it works:

[nietsch]

Ok the linked article is a bit misleading, or the explanation at the IBM site is not correct anymore.

This is the section How it works from the IBM site:

How does it work?

Technically, FairUCE tries to find a relationship between the envelope sender's domain and the IP address of the client delivering the mail, using a series of cached DNS look-ups. For the vast majority of legitimate mail, from AOL to mailing lists to vanity domains, this is a snap. If such a relationship cannot be found, FairUCE attempts to find one by sending a user-customizable challenge/response. This alone catches 80% of UCE and very rarely challenges legitimate mail. A future version will incorporate Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or similar sender identification systems; SPF-enabled domains will not require a challenge. Challenges are sent using a dedicated queue with a short lifetime so it does not get bogged down or interfere with legitimate mail.

If a relationship can be found, FairUCE checks the recipient's whitelist and blacklist, as well as the domain's reputation, to determine whether to accept, reject, challenge on reputation, or present the user with a set of whitelist/blacklist options. A future version will use a real domain reputation system; currently this is implemented as a "whois" look-up to determine the domain's age when it first sent mail to the recipient

I do not read spamming the sender here, only trying a challenge/response on probable spammers.