Slashdot Mirror
McColo Takedown, Vigilantes Or Neighborhood Watch?
CWmike writes "Few tears were shed when alleged spam and malware purveyor McColo was suddenly taken offline last Tuesday by its upstream service providers. But behind the scenes of the McColo case and another recent takedown of Intercage, a ferocious struggle is taking place between the purveyors of Web-based malware and loosely aligned but highly committed groups of security researchers who are out to neutralize them. Backers claim that the effort to shut down miscreant ISPs is needed because of the inability of law enforcement agencies to deal with a problem that is global in nature. But some question whether there is a hint of vigilantism behind the takedowns — even as they acknowledge that there may not be any other viable options for dealing with the problem at this point."
Spammers are like Roaches. You can never quite kill them all off.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
Yeah, and vigilantes have a long history of killing the innocents that happen to be near the Big Bad Man(tm) when the big brown slimy hits the fan. There's a reason we have laws, and a police force -- and it's partly to keep our casualties to a minimum. Vigilantism is nothing more than frustration combined with a big ego... And a hero can be properly defined as "someone who gets other people killed". Sure... it's just an internet connection... But the ethics are the same. Security researchers so often have over-inflated egos and think they're doing everyone a favor, but the truth is... Sometimes they screw up and people get hurt and money is wasted.
Shouldn't they be accountable to the same rules they're holding others to? If not, they're hypocrites too.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
> If innocent customers of the rouge colo got hurt when the lines got cut, then they
> simply have to suffer the consequences of picking a bad host to buy services from.
No, they need to sue the colo for breach of contract (a class-action might be appropriate here).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's quite a double-standard that we live in a world where SPAM is evil and ISPs should cut them off, and yet it's not OK to cut people off for sharing files that infringe copyright.
I wonder if the "Our wireless network was open! It wasn't us spamming!" defence would work for them.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
You can't make an omlette without breaking eggs. I for one, and sick of finding spam in my omlette.
When you are breaking the rules, you can't complain when someone takes your toys away. I feel utterly zero pity/sadness/whatever in regards to this. As far as I am concerned, spammers are at the utter bottom of the food chain. Damned plankton eaters.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
You asked and I'm happy to oblige. As spam systems go this one scores fairly well. The biggest problem is the "worm-ridden Windows boxes" checkbox.
----
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
(.x.) Boobies.
The one month graph gives a good feel for perspective, which is really fucking impressive to me. One colo was responsible for THAT MUCH botnet generated spam traffic? Wow.