Spammers on the Run

ericald writes "An interesting update from Blue Security, the group that introduces the Blue Frog initiative to fight spam, claims that during the past few days at least one spammer had frequently deleted domains he owned as a result of their system. In another update in their blog they report they have already recruited over 21,000 users. It's about time spammers start feeling the heat! I'm just surprised they show results so soon."

Comments

what do they do?

[ResQuad]

I'm confused. What does this blue frog inituative do thats so magical to get rid of spammers. "Look we're getting rid of spammers"... Well HOW?

Its great and all yes? But what are they doing?

Re:what do they do?

[Anonymous Coward]

users report spam. Blue frog employees check the spam and the web sites listed in the spam. If they believe it is spam, they use their clients to send 1 negative complaint to the website for each spam message that company has sent. Its like the slashdot effect only coordinated against spammers

Re:what do they do?

[CDarklock]

Blue Frog essentially responds to spam with complaints. So spammer X sends fifty thousand spam mail messages to Blue Frog users, and he gets fifty thousand complaints back. It's an eye-for-an-eye technique done properly: one spam, one complaint.

I see this as having two major effects. First, it keeps the spam away from you. Second, it informs the spammer that nobody read his spam. Spammers *depend* on human beings reading their spam. As long as nobody reads it, nobody buys.

Re:what do they do?

[Fordiman]

Almost. The process works as such:

For each e-mail address you regiester with Blue Frog, they create a honey pot account and seed the internet with it.

Each spam that honey pot gets is entered into a database, based on links contained, ip address sourced from, etc.

Humans look over the databased data, using it to find out who the source of common spams are (not the spammer, but the company who hired them).

Then, for each spam from that company found in a honey pot, a complaint is programmatically sent from the BlueFrog software that sits on the honey pot owner's client computer.

Essentially, it's a set of software that allows you to complain about spam in an organized way without actually having to do the investigation, etc yourself. Further, since it keeps all information to just the honey pots' data, if the spamming company decided that your complaint is evidence that you want more spam, they get complained against further. The more users that are members of the Blue Community, the more damaging this is to the offending company.

Spamming is cheap, and virtually without risk. Essentially, this is a legal way to shift reality so that it's more risky to pay a spammer for your advertising.

Yes it's legal. No, it's not spamming the spammers. They only get one complaint per spam recieved. You'd do it yourself, given the time to do so. Meanwhile, you've explicitly installed a piece of software to do it for you. If that breaks their server, well they probably shouldn't be sending so much goddamn spam.

Blue Security

[kevin_conaway]

For those that don't know what Blue Security does, see this thread.

Basically, they DDOS spammers websites in hopes that they will shut them down.

Anti-Blue Frog

[JonN]

An interesting article over at TechNewsWorld about how Blue Frog is not what we need in the battle against spam. "It's the worst kind of vigilante approach," said John Levine, a board member with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "Deliberate attacks against people's Web sites are illegal."

Re:Anti-Blue Frog

[Seanasy]

TechNewsWorld? Ah, one of those ECT publications. They have such esteemed writers as Maureen O'Gara on their payroll. Their publications are barely news and frequently contain some form of troll or flamebait to get them posted on Slashdot.

If you thought ZDnet was crap, ECT makes them smell like roses.

The missing link

[erykjj]

Blue Security

Make them run using Postfix?

[xiando]

smtpd_sender_restrictions = reject_unknown_address
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
permit_sasl_authenticated,
reject_non_fqdn_sender,
reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
reject_unknown_sender_domain,
reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
permit_mynetworks,
reject_unauth_destination,
reject_rbl_client ombie.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org,
reject_rbl_client opm.blitzed.org,
reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org,
reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org,
permit

We are also using SpamAssassinn / razor / clamav using amavisd-new. The main mail account used for everything from clients webmaster@ mail to contact@ are getting numerous spam daily, yet only three or perhaps four a month get delivered... and those are added to our body_checks.txt which is publicly available for download by anyone, including spammers who I have a feeling makes spammers think twice and clean us off their list when they find themselves listed there using search engines etc.

Re:Russian spammers fate

[Ilikeions]

Whot about the bloke in Russia who got 'blown away' with a gun for excess spamming?

Vardan Kushnir was beaten to death as the result of a botched robbery. That he was a prolific spammer was incidental.

From InformationWeek:

According to the Kommersant, a Moscow newspaper, police said Kushnir met three women in a club, and invited them to his apartment. The women then spiked his drink, but when Kushnir woke up to find the women's accomplices taking credit cards, a laptop, money, and other items, he was bludgeoned to death, the paper said.

Re:Spammers fate

[jeremy_faller]

I don't know where you got, "Any biological system obeys a gaussian or normal distribution. This includes patterns of behaviour in a population." That is not necesarily true, as you haven't demonstrated independence of the "random variables" in your biological system.

IANAS(tatistician), and I admit you will see the central limit theorem take over in some aspects of human behaviour, but I'm pretty sure I can so show some correlation in others.

Re:Excuse me...

[Anne Thwacks]

Shame the web site doent make that a bit clearer. And also how to sign up for the service. It just tells you how to become a member, and explains that that is not how you sign up for the service.