Botnet Mafia in Online Turf War

An anonymous reader writes " The kind of turf war seen in the real world by drug gangs is being replicated by the criminal gangs behind spamming botnets, and things are turning nasty."

Comments

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the UK ISPs routinely cut off people if their machines are spewing spam (or other malware). The first thing most users know is when any web page they try and visit takes them to an ISP page telling them to run some malware scanning software.

Rich.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[TeXMaster]

Oh I'll just love it when my ISP blocks my internet connection because I just sent a patchset by email to a *-devel list for peer review.

I know the good intentions and all that, but seriously, I'm already pissed enough at my ISP (Tiscali.it) that doesn't allow me to send more than 3 consecutive emails.

So either implement this kind of stuff with a proper way to tell spam sending from acceptable mass mailing, or be ready to handle hordes of very angry customers.

Re:Trying to care

[Anonymous Coward]

You're lucky then. All it takes is for your address to end up in some other person's email client, and they become infected with a spam harvester bot of some kind. It's not as if you even have to communicate with that person. Some fool can forward a crap joke to everyone they know, chances are they won't use bcc:, resulting in your address being sent to a fair number of people.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[asninn]

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, people are lazy, but switching to a different ISP is more of a hassle than running a virus/malware scanner; even if you're really computer-unsavvy, you'll probably have a child, sibling, cousin or friend who knows a bit more about computers and can do it for you.

And I still haven't seen any mail protocol proposals that would both cut down on spam in an effective fashion as well as not interfere with legitimate mail and not violating non-technical requirements like privacy etc.

Seriously, spam is a semantic problem, in a way; something that is spam for one person or in one situation need not be spam for someone else or in another situation. I'm signed up for a handful of company newsletters informing me about special offers etc., for example, and those aren't spam (since I signed up for them), but if I received them without having signed up, I'd definitely consider them spam. How is a mail delivery protocol supposed to be able to distinguish between these situations?