Security threats Toolkit

Story: Black Frog hops into spam battle

Posted by: John Hummel (Friday 26 May 2006, 3:22 PM)

So this all boils down to a question: Will such an attempt be successful?

Right now, spamming "works" because of two reasons:

1. The cost of distributing thousands of emails is very small, made smaller by the "zombie networks" of hacked, unpatched machines (typically home Windows users who leave thier machines connected to the Internet 24/7 and have no clue about security).

2. There are people dumb enough to buy their stuff.

The idea behind Black Frog is to flood the spammers with so many fake requests that they can not tell ligitimate ones from fake, so they have to spend the time and energy (which equals money) to make their profits, which nor invalidates condition #1: Spam is cheap.

I'm not so sure this is the best route. Personally, I believe the best approach is to work on the zombie networks. If an ISP detects a large amount of spam-like mail coming from a client, they should cut that client off until they have the appropriate software installed (firewall, virus detection, etc). Of course, ISP's don't like that since now they have irate customers and have to spend more money getting their customers secure.

Odds are, a combination of the two will be the best defense, but I expect that until people are simply wise enough to ignore spam, it will always be a problem. [sarcasm]Well, that and everyone getting a Mac would help reduce zombie networks.[/sarcasm] (Note the sarcasm tags - this isn't an invitation for flame wars and trollish comments - just suppose to be a joke.)