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Spam War Takes Out Blog Services
munchola writes "Following on from the story about spammers attacking Blue Security's anti-spam system, CBR is reporting that Six Apart, which runs the popular LiveJournal and TypePad blogging services, has become a collateral victim. Six Apart told its millions of bloggers it had experienced 'intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com', before resolving the issue in the early hours of Wednesday. '[The spammers are] trying to rip apart the internet just to make our community stop fighting back against spam,' Blue Security's chief executive Eran Reshef said, adding that he knows who's behind the attack."
The best way to eradicate spammers would simply be to go after their clients.
That hasn't worked yet. If you have some idea how that could be accomplished and effective against spam and spammers, please feel free to elaborate.
Blue security seems to be causing pain to spammers, enough to get a rise out of them at least. Aren't they actually reflecting the spam back to the source? I think that was their tactic.
If they are effective, that's a net positive in the spam fight.
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Even if that's not the case here, it's certainly possible for someone malicious to subvert Blue Security's agent in such a manner.
It seems blue security has been compromised by the spammers.
I can't see why blue security should be blamed- except for their security problem.
The problem is spam and spammers, and it is ludicrous to think otherwise.
I have been working on the spam problem for >10 years.
The problem is lax ISPs and network operators who don't pay attention to their mail. Who don't jump on the trojaned machines on their network that are causing >90% of the spam problem in the world.
I have had the same trojaned machine sending me the same spam every 15 minutes, from a school district. It took me days to finally get a shitty response out of the network operators there to get that machine shut down until it could be cleaned. They didn't seem concerned at all, it was like I was "bothering them" to ask them to stop that machine from spamming.
I bet it was sending 150,000 messages between the ones I received. Obviously a major problem. They couldn't care less.
Now THEY should have been DOS'd.
Ya know, several years ago I asked one of the principles of Akamai to get involved, to provide some of the bandwidth and hosting in a fault tolerant fashion, which they reportedly are in a unique position to provide on their monitored distributed network. Practically cannot be effectivedly DOS'd. They thought my proposal "interesting" but didn't want to get involved for the good of the internet, because they didn't want to attract attention from the bad guys.
It wasn't 5 or 6 months before they were DOS'd and extorted.
EVERYONE is involved now. We are all being extorted by the spammers. If you cross them they will attack you, even if you just ask them to please stop spamming you.
The only possible answer is responsibility. Networks being responsible for what goes on over their network. Shut down spammers. Don't rent them servers. Don't sell them bandwidth. Jump on problems, even on weekends and holidays, and you have to do it FAST.
Nothing is going to stop spam completely, we can only increase the cost to spammers, and increase the costs for networks to sell to spammers. Make it uneconomical to have spammers as customers.
When the cheapest T-1 a spammer can find is $250,000 a month, spam will stop.
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