Slashdot Mirror
SpamSlayer - should we DDOS spammers?
pointbeing writes "Just read this article about a company called Blue Security that essentially floods a spammer's website with requests to unsubscribe members - we're talking thousands of requests per day - the company's CEO says that fighting back by "inducing loss" against spammers is the only way to eventually stop them.
Although I hate spam as much as the next guy, is participating in a DDOS attack the way to bring spammers to their knees? If it's okay in this instance, it it okay to DDOS the next guy who does something we don't like?
"
Wouldn't it just be easier to slashdot a site owned by a spammer company?
Isn't there some rule of thumb - never fight evil with evil? This is a vigilante approach which is reserved exclusively for BATMAN
Easy! To get around all these little rules, we'll just hijack a bunch of PCs to our dirty work for us. I'm sure the owners will not mind helping out for a truly noble cause. Then, we'll use servers in countries with questionable laws to control the DDOS. Then, to raise money to help us out in our quest, we'll use these servers to also mail out requests to help us secure our target US$20mil by sending us a paltry US$20k. We've got the spammers beat in will power AND on the moral high ground!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Does sco.com have an unsubscribe link? ;)
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Sorry, but I can't feel bad for spammers (or sites that support them) who get DDoS'ed. They make their $ by annoying millions in the hopes that hundreds will be gullible enough to buy their crap. What goes around comes around... and I fully support the use of DDoS attacks against these loosers.
Furthermore.. the repeated HTTP requets should include in their USER_AGENT header the following so it shows up in the logs ("LOOKS_LIKE_YOUR_WEB_SERVER_NEEDS_SOME_V1aGrA")
This beggs me to ask, do twon wrongs make a right?
I don't know, but if two wrongs do make a right then your above sentence contains no spelling errors whatsover.
...because it's illegal to castrate them.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
skip the ads and jump right to the good articles.
Jump to the what?
Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people spammed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people spammed. Hello? Hello, Dimitri? Listen, I can't hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? Oh, that's much better. Yes. Fine, I can hear you now, Dimitri. Clear and plain and coming through fine. I'm coming through fine too, eh? Good, then. Well then as you say we're both coming through fine. Good. Well it's good that you're fine and I'm fine. I agree with you. It's great to be fine. Now then Dimitri. You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the spam. The spam, Dimitri. The email spam. Well now what happened is, one of our base commanders, he had a sort of, well he went a little funny in the head. You know. Just a little... funny. And uh, he went and did a silly thing.
My mail server got hacked and ( )\/\/ |\| ) by some sleazebag spammer. It ended up sending a bunch of spam that had a URL to click on to "sign up" for their wonderful offer. After recovering and updating the mail server I wrote a quick little program that ran overnight that filled in this web form with garbage, but not random garbage that could be filtered out. To a machine each record looked valid. I ended up inserting over 200k records into their database making it worthless. I did it again a few times when I was able to get an IP address that didn't get blocked at the server.
Was it right? Probably not. Did it feel good, HELL YES.
We *should* have tracked them down and obliterated them years ago.
;)
I can't wait until we can travel back in time and flog those two. Had they been slapped down hardcore when it first happened, we'd have:
* Less lawyers
* Less spammers.
I'm failing to see a bad side to this.
No, I'm not talking about enacting more laws, I mean having the government declare a "war on spammers", where DDoS attacks are used against them by the military in a digital carpet-bombing campaign.
That would take care of the whiny limp-wristed liberals crying "slippery slope" and "no better than them", and it would satisfy the bloodlust of the neocons. We could even hold spammers indefinitely in military prison camps by labelling them "enemy combatants".
Think of the possibilities!
Oh, wait, I see what you mean. Okay guys, the next Viagra e-mail you receive, eveyone go to the site and buy something.
The vast flood of orders will overload their system and stress their payment systems. That'll teach them...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
That will merely 1mpr0ve the s1ze of their ordering system!
;)
maybe we should market such spam to spammers....
Oneday I was sitting at the console of my gateway pouring over the logs. I noticed that the requests for port 25 was unusually high. Mostly resolving to .cn. Anyhow I banged out this one liner and let it run for a few hours, and had tcpdump keep track of everything from another upstram box.
/dev/random | nc -l -p 25
(not verbatim, but you get the point)
# cat
Entertainment soon ensued as they threw every script they had at the box trying to figure out WTF it was.