E-Mail Spam Goes Artisanal (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Spam filters have come a long way over the past two decades — but spammers have, too. Though email providers are better than ever at blocking spam, it's still big business, with a lot of money to be made. Security researchers are seeing a new trend in spam: less volume, and better targeting. The article mentions "snowshoe" attacks, which occupy the middle ground between massive spam campaigns and tiny phishing attacks. "Craig Williams, a senior manager at Talos, said the amount of snowshoe spam has more than doubled in the past two years and now accounts for more than 15 percent of all junk messages distributed globally." Security researchers have been pushing for a unified registry to help deal with these mid-range spammers, but it's hard to get a significant portion of providers on the same page, particularly when many are fond of running their own solutions.

Comments

Haven't seen this one in a while

[phantomfive]

Your post advocates a

(*) technical () legislative ( ) market-based ( ) 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
( ) 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

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
() 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
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(* ) 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!

Nobody should be surprised by this

[damn_registrars]

Of course the spammers will find ways to get around the filters, they make money by doing exactly that. The companies behind the filters are patting themselves on the back right now because the volume of read spam is down, but they aren't bothering to tell you that the false positive rate keeps creeping up over time. The critical measurement lies there, in the signal to noise ratio.

Any time the spammers can push down the signal to noise ratio, they win. It means a few more messages get through, and a few more sales are made. Alternatively, it means a few more non-spam emails are caught in filters, which causes people to adjust their filters to let more borderline messages through. The whole time, everyone on the internet is paying to be on the losing side of this arms race.

At the end of the day, as I have said many many times here, spam is an economic problem. No technical, legal, or spiritual solution will stop it. As long as people can make money as spammers, they will keep sending out spam, with no concern for where or to whom it goes. There is only one way to stop spam, and that is by making sure the spammers don't get paid. As soon as the money stops coming in, the spam stops going out.