Have Spammers Overcome the CAPTCHA?

thefickler writes "It appears that spammers have found a way to automatically create Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts. They have already generated more than 15,000 bogus Hotmail accounts, according to security company BitDefender. The company says that a new threat, dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using automatically generated Yahoo and Hotmail accounts to send out spam email, which suggests that spammers have found a way to overcome Microsoft's and Yahoo's CAPTCHA systems."

Comments

Too bad MS ignores RFC 2821

[Kadin2048]

One of the (many) things I hate about Hotmail is that Microsoft blatantly ignores anything sent to its postmaster and abuse addresses, so there's really no way to notify them of spam being spewed from their system. In fact, if you send a message to postmaster@hotmail.com, they send back a pretty snarky response telling you that nobody reads it.

What a cesspool. Hotmail has always been the ghetto of the internet, but now it's clear that it's infested with criminals, as well as just the technologically illiterate.

Time to blackhole it.

Sounds like BlueFrog

[Kadin2048]

I think this was basically the idea behind BlueFrog; they had a pretty nice, aggressive system for going after the sites that profit from spam, by bouncing spam emails back at them and generally causing them a lot of grief.

It was obviously working, as demonstrated by the concentrated fire they started to take from spammers. Unfortunately, they didn't have the resources (at least, I'd prefer to think it was a resource issue and not one of will) to fight the spammers, and after getting some really terrible legal advice, they got crushed.

Short of brutal vigilante justice (which I'm not opposed to here and there, but it tends to not scale very well), Blue Frog's approach seemed to be the only "supply-side" approach to spam that ever seemed to show a bit of effectiveness.