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

Spammers fate

[bigwavejas]

Spammers must realize by now they run an awful risk by having their true identities tracked down and then posted for punishment. It won't be long until search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) start compiling results for them such as, "Mr/ Mrs X Illegally spammed millions of people." Employers certainly will rethink hiring someone with such tainted credentials. It just isn't worth it nowadays to harass people with unwanted/ unwarranted emails. This is a resounding wake-up call for these cretins to rethink their ill-fated profession.

Re:Spammers fate

[SFalcon]

When the spammers can afford to pay $7m to Microsoft, I don't think they need to worry about being hired by anyone.

Re:Spammers fate

[KiloByte]

Not really. The notoriety will give them some fame, and tell potential advertisers that those spammers know how to send spam in really large amounts.

Re:Spammers fate

[Dunbal]

Employers certainly will rethink hiring someone with such tainted credentials.

      I know we're living in the era where corporations and employers believe they have the right to do anything they want. But while refusing to employ someone on hearsay is within an employer's rights, there's a chance of shooting yourself in the foot and actually hiring the guy who was smart enough to cover his tracks, rather than the silly, average person whose box was "owned" and spammed without thier knowledge.

      Oh but we all know that search engines are infalliable and are the best way to screen a potential employee, right? Come on. If I can steal your identity and borrow money in your name, how hard can it be to spam in your name? Frankly this would not be an employer worth working for.

Re:Spammers fate

[Dunbal]

that it must actually be somewhat successful,

      Of course it's successful. Any biological system obeys a gaussian or normal distribution. This includes patterns of behaviour in a population. There is always a bunch of people on the edge of this curve who will buy anything. The gullible, the impulsive, the mentally handicapped, the bipolars in their manic phase. If you spam enough people, you will hit enough of this extreme population to make a "business" out of it. What sucks is that the entire rest of the population who are not at all interested in the "product" will also have been spammed at this point.

      But the spammers don't care, all they want is cash. I wouldn't be able to live with myself knowing I did this for a living, but the spammers obviously have no problem with it.

      If the spammers were smart they would have a list of gullible people by now and target their population more intensly, to save on effort. You might as well bleed em dry, right?

Re:Spammers fate

[joto]

The "better" spam filters described by Graham are already getting pretty common in decent mail user agents. And yes, bayesian filtering works well.

However, it will not make spam unprofitable. To make it unprofitable, the costs of sending spam must be higher than the money you get from it. So in some way, we need to increase the costs of sending spam, or reduce profits.

The cost of sending spam is essentially zero. Sure, you may have to switch ISP once in a while, register some new domains, invest in some CDs with email-addresses, buy some software or consultants to infect machines, etc... But it really doesn't matter. Even with todays hostility towards spammers, the cost is still essentially zero.

The profits of spam is:

• price_of_whatever_you_sell * number_of_email_addresses * some_really_low_fraction

where really_low_fraction is the number of idiots who fall for your scam.

Bayesian filtering doesn't address either costs or profits. It does not make sending spam more expensive, and it does not change the some_really_low_fraction, because the idiots who respond to spam wouldn't be using bayesian filtering anyway.

So Bayesian filtering is nice for the end-users who just want to get through their mail, but it doesn't really help solve the problem of making spam unprofitable.

That's funny. I'm still getting spam.

[bigtallmofo]

I'm amazed at Blue Security's success. They've gotten a few spammers to shut down a few domains.

The odd thing is, I'm still receiving as much spam as I've always received. No matter how many tens of thousands of users they sign up for this process, I fear this is going to be a very small drop in a very large bucket.

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.

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.

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

[darkmayo]

Personally I think the "worst kind" of vigilante approach would be getting the spammers home addresses and savagely beating them... or killing them. I dont think DDOSing some spammer pricks domain is that bad if you compare what could happen to these people.

Re:Anti-Blue Frog

[Quiet_Desperation]

Personally I think the "WORST kind" of vigilante approach would be getting the spammers home addresses and savagely beating them... or killing them.

You misspelled "best".

Re:Anti-Blue Frog

[RealAlaskan]

Personally I think the "worst kind" of vigilante approach would be getting the spammers home addresses and savagely beating them... or killing them.

Isn't that spelled ``best''?

Seriously, the grandparent post refered to this as a DDOS. If the spammer sends me an email, he's certainly got no right to complain if he gets one back. If he gets enough back to shut down his website, well, he shouldn't have sent so much spam, should he? My understanding is that Blue Frog tries to send an unsubscribe message for every spammed address (their website is slashdotted)? If so, the spammers have already announced their willingness to get that message, and it is obviously legal.

Re:what do they do?

[L. VeGas]

What does this blue frog inituative do thats so magical to get rid of spammers.

You really don't know? Geneticists have engineered a breed of frogs that subsist entirely on Spam. An interesting side effect is their attractive blue coloration.

Foot, meet bullet

[Tackhead]

> 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."

An interesting update from Spammers-R-Us, Inc [...] In another update in their blog, they report they have already gotten over 21,000 Slashdotters to hit the Blue Frog site. It's about time spamfighters started feeling the heat! I'm just surprised they show the results within 20 posts on the thread!

- with apologies to the original article poster :)

A better idea

[Quiet_Desperation]

I propose the Blue Steel program where spammers are hunted down like animals. Sponsored by Colt. Successful hunters will be allowed to mount the heads on their walls.

Re:Realistic View?

[Rev.LoveJoy]

I think by and large most corporations are taking this tack in dealing with spam sent to their MTAs. If you do not do business with that country, ban their IP block. This is an inexpensive 100% solution to spam from overseas.

Public ISPs, universities and government centers do not (and can not) take this route. So these orgs must take another path towards dealing with international spam.

Filtering works. Greylisting works. These technologies help a great deal against the zombie armies everyone said would be unstoppable spam sources.

I am glad you have a solution which works for you (and to some extent, I agree with your soultion), but I would hate for the balkanization of the Internet to come about due to the misbehavior of a few rotten apples. I think there must be a better way.

Cheers,
-- RLJ

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.

Kill profits by consuming resources

[G4from128k]

Blue Frog is effective because it consumes spammer's resources -- it raises the costs of being a spammer. Spam filtering does not reduce spammer's profits in that the same people that filter spam were never likely to visit the spam site and purchase. Filtering doesn't change spammer's revenues or costs.

In contrast, a bot that visits a spammer's site consumes the spammer's valuable resources in far greater amounts that is consumed by the original spam e-mail (spam emails often being under 10kB and sent via low-cost zombies vs. 50kB or 100kB for most web pages begin hosted on the spammer's e-commerce site).

Re:That's funny. I'm still getting spam.

[ameline]

Of course I'm sure you don't find it at all ironic that you include spam in your very own signatture line, do you?

feh.

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.