Striking back at spammers?

[Urban Ranger]

Paul Graham advocates that the next generation of spam filters should use automated 'bots to track down URLs listed in the spams. If a large number of users do that, that will amount to massive distributed denial of attacks against spam advertisements. Clearly, the software needs to be written properly, and protect large public websites needs to be protected.

This idea has merit though, which is to take the battle to the spammers. Get on the offensive.

What do you think?

[alva]

Whatever works

[self biased]

the best defense is a good offense.

[H Tower]

aren't DDOS attacks illegal?

[Ted Striker]

At first reaction hell yeah

However SPAMers often hijack unsuspecting servers and use them as relays

It's too dangerous and many innocent servers will get hurt

I can't remember which WIndows virus it was, but some admin modified the virus to go out and fix all the infected pcs. He had a nice intention, however the side effect of his "fix" was that it generated way too much network traffic.

[Jon Miller]

wHTA IS mOING

jkPOKN mILLER

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
At first reaction hell yeah

However SPAMers often hijack unsuspecting servers and use them as relays

It's too dangerous and many innocent servers will get hurt

He isn't proposing attacks on mail servers. He's proposing tracking down the URLs contained in spam messages, which should be the sites spammers want to promote.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by H Tower
aren't DDOS attacks illegal?

They won't be DDoS attacks, but the effects will be the same.

[Sikander]

Eat flaming lead fascist multimedia pigs!

[Wraith]

--"Paul Graham advocates that the next generation of spam filters should use automated 'bots to track down URLs listed in the spams."

I don't think he understands how the latest spam works. The serious guys don't have sites hosted on real servers with static IPs. A lot of the e-mail trojans and viruses these days include things like small web servers, you see...

It's rather amazing to what length the spammers are going. Some of the URLs for these sites don't have the same IP for more than two minutes in a row. Tracking down the URLs doesn't do you any good at all unless you can somehow inform people that their computer is infected and then get them to fix it. This is not an easy task; blaster, among others, is still all over the place.

Wraith
"Awww. I wanted to explode."
-- Gir ("Invader Zim")

[Urban Ranger]

I suppose that is possible, though the technical challenges are so big that I don't think spammers will go the length of doing it.

[mindseye]

Give me weapons! GIVE ME WEAPONS!

[MrFun]

You can have your weapons as long as you leave me and my cache of WMPDs alone.

[Atahualpa]

nah that wont work. A spammer just needs to write an innocent url somewhere. Not a big popular one but just a small one and it would piss that guy off pretty much.

I am all for a new Mail Protocol! But AMTP doesnt seem to do the trick IMO.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
nah that wont work. A spammer just needs to write an innocent url somewhere. Not a big popular one but just a small one and it would piss that guy off pretty much.

That's why the URL will be checked by a human first.

Did you read the linked article?