Cyber Extortion
In the Fight Against Spam E-Mail, Goliath Wins Again
Reshef's Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.Yet another reason why the end of the internet might be in sight - the SPAM epidemic shows no sign of abating and is destroying the usefulness of email.
Then, earlier this month, a Russia-based spammer counterattacked, Reshef said. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, the spammer flooded Blue Security with so much Internet traffic that it blocked legitimate visitors from going to Bluesecurity.com, as well as to other Web sites. The spammer also sent another message: Cease operations or Blue Security customers will soon find themselves targeted with virus-filled attacks.
I remember when you could email net.gods with a question and actually get an answer - these days its hard enough to get an answer from anyone because you are likely to end up in the spam bucket.
Worse still - certain free webmail based sites have not got a clue about how to handle spam.
Domain blocking is NOT going to work guys - these spammers are using fictional domains - you need to implement subject based blocking as well - I should only have to block "Pink Razor Phone" or "Horny Housewives" ONCE and should never see a mail with that subject again - and yes I am talking about the new Hotmail "Live Mail" beta which has seen my spam count go up from 0-2 a day to as many as 20 .... grrrrrrr.
Tags: email, spam, ddos, cyber extortion, cyber crime, livemail, spam blockers, cyber war