CastleCops Anti-Malware Site Closes Down

Fortran IV writes "Volunteer-powered anti-malware site CastleCops appears to have closed shop. As of Tuesday, December 23, the CastleCops home page notes: 'You have arrived at the CastleCops website, which is currently offline. . . . Unfortunately, all things come to an end.' It was reported back in June that Paul Laudanski, founder of CastleCops and its parent Computer Cops LLC, was taking a full-time job with Microsoft and was 'looking for new management' for CastleCops. The site has also long had problems with funding and with hostile action from spammers. The actual shutdown seems to have taken the security community by surprise; as late as Tuesday evening Brian Krebs was still recommending CastleCops on his Security Fix blog."

Comments

Re:Hostile Action from Spammers

[M1rth]

Basic problem:

Castlecops were volunteers. Spammers do what they do for a living. Eventually, the volunteers have to get back to the real world, while the spammers keep going and going because you're hitting them in the pocketbook.

Either we need a lot more volunteers, or we need to start imposing the the death sentence on convicted spammers and get the root problem solved.

the community

[gandhi_2]

When looking for information about this or that virus, I would sometimes come across CastleCops.

The website looked a lot like all the superwindowsvirussmasher scam websites....You may have trojan.dropper.w32, free scanner here! with all the ads, color, and layout.

It's possible that it just never presented a legit-looking or professional experience. I'm no the only one who thought this...the community let it die too.

Re:Hostile Action from Spammers

[causality]

Either we need a lot more volunteers, or we need to start imposing the the death sentence on convicted spammers and get the root problem solved.

That'll stop spam about as well as prison terms and (sometimes) death sentences have stopped drug traffickers. What you are dealing with is not a technological problem, which is why spam filters and anti-malware efforts have not ended spam. You're not dealing with a legal problem either because even if new laws to punish spammers somehow worked perfectly, and they won't, that could only change the jurisdiction from which the spam is being sent. Not to mention that if spamming becomes riskier because more spammers are caught and punished, you will actually make it more profitable for the ones that don't get caught (possibly those from other jurisdictions) because you will have removed their competitors.

This is an economic problem. The interesting thing about economic problems is that so long as there is sufficient demand for something, the suppliers will amaze you with both their ingenuity and their willingness to take risks to deliver it. We saw this with alcohol prohibition, we see this now with the War on (Some) Drugs, and we're also seeing it now with spam. The real problem with spam is that the spammers' costs are extremely low and there are enough idiots who buy from them to make it profitable. Punishing spammers amounts to a form of prohibition. Prohibition has never worked (they can't even keep illegal drugs out of prisons) and it's not going to start working now. It really amazes me that so many human beings can understand human nature so poorly that it was ever even tried, let alone that it continues today despite any social costs and that there are still people who would suggest applying this failed idea to more novel problems. When we, collectively, try something and find out that it has never worked and is never going to work, we think the solution to that is to try harder instead of trying something else. It's like a cross between that saying about having only a hammer and perceiving everything as a nail and that saying about the definition of insanity.

If the goal is to catch a tiny percentage of them and feel vindicated while your inbox continues to fill up with spam, the "crime and punishment" approach will do. If your goal is to end spam, then your only real option is to reduce the number of people willing to buy from spammers (the demand) until spamming is no longer profitable. Like many others, I have some ideas but I don't have the solution. At this stage though, I think that what's missing is a sound understanding of the problem.