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

[PeeAitchPee]

People who keep getting blocked every 3 months will quickly learn to take better care of their computers.

It's a great theory, but in practice, I'm afraid that your average lazy consumer will simply switch to another (non-blocking) ISP who will happily take their money. 99% of the computer users out there don't even know what a spam bot is (unless they can regurgitate some buzzword from a commercial they saw), let alone how to fix a crippled PC. Your strategy only works if all the ISPs agree to it, and that ain't gonna happen.

Let's face it -- it's time for a new and improved mail protocol.

Re:Trying to care

[tomstdenis]

I posted in usenet for several years, wrote OSS software, have my email addy on my websites, etc.

My work email has yet to receive a single spam. Oh, that's because I don't use it for anything but work and it's not on any webpage.

Tom

aren't you special?

[ClioCJS]

You come off as an asshole. Just letting you know.

P.S. Some of us need personal email and have relied on it heavily for 15 years.

PGP is your friend

[oliverthered]

If people actually started using the tools that have been available for years and signed their emails it would be a lot easier to spot the ones sent out by spam bots.

It's amazing how hard it is to get a company to send you a signed email to prove who they are and even harder to send an encrypted email containing personal information to them even though everyone knows how insecure email it.

Lazy Government,
Lazy Companies,
Lazy Consumers.
The tools are there for free and have been for years.

Re:Trying to care

[inviolet]

As someone who doesn't have an email address anymore, I really don't care about spam in the slightest, or the battle they go over to spam people.

You do realize that the costs of spam mitigation are all passed on to you, in the form of higher prices for gadgets, for professional and financial services, and eventually for everything else? Or do you not care about that either?

By the way, now that we are out of the Grunge era, it is no longer automatically cool to not care about such things.

Re:fix the cause not the symptom

[mpe]

The war on drugs is a miserable failure. So please find another parable

A "war on spam" might actually work better than "war on drugs" simply because there are liklely to be far fewer people who wants spam than want various drugs.

the whole enviroment that these people thrive in is made possible by MS Windows and its' horrible security. why don't we start screaming about fixing the root cause of the problem ?

Thing is that there are plenty of people who appear to think that Microsoft's bluring the line between user & administrator or having a "monoculture" environment is a good thing.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[jeffasselin]

We don't need more laws, we simply need better laws written by people who actually understand the technology that needs to be regulated.

Re:And this will only get worse

[joto]

People switch their common sense off when they access the internet. I have no other explanation for this phenomenon. You can get most people to double click your attachment with the most hare brained excuse, "important news from your lawyer" is often enough.

So why shouldn't people doubleclick their attachments? I mean, to read the attachment, you have to doubleclick it, right? So why are you suggesting that they shouldn't?

This is completely counterintuitive. The people who need to be held responsible are the idiot programmers who allow arbitrary code to be executed by clicking on attachments in a program deliberately designed for end-users. Such a feature in an email-program sounds like it might be more useful to movable-computation researchers working on lab-machines in a closed network.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to keep anyone from using the net. But as with everything that can be harmful to other people using the same tools you do, you have to act responsibly. This applies to cars, this applies to guns, and it also applies to machines with internet connection.

And by clicking on attachments, you are harming someone? By simply leaving your computer connected to the Internet, you are harming someone?

This is completely counterintuitive. It would be like prosecuting car-owners for having their cars parked in the garage instead of constantly driving it to and from the factory for "updates". Or prosecuting gun-owners because the manufacturer of the gun decided that whenever you put the safety on, the gun would fire a shot, if someone sent a certain radio-signal.

Nonsense! Technical problems deserve a technical solution!