The dark side of punishing spammers ?

Well I finally did it... I got so sick of spam I finally did something about it instead of just moaning. I went to Spam Bully, downloaded and installed their 14 day trial version, introduced it to some spam in my deleted folder and hey presto: no more spam.

One feature of Spam Bully that appealed to me was it's ability to "punish" spammers. If you receive a piece of spam with a link to a website and instruct the program to punish it, Spam Bully will invisibly click on the link "a few times". This has the effect of increasing bandwidth usage without generating income for the spammer, making their spam site less financially viable. Once a few hundred thousand people have anti-spam software which punishes spammers in this way, any spam site, once identified and punished, will effectively start to generate it's own DoS attack. Ha Ha ! Take that, you spamming SoBs.

But...

I told a friend who works in computing about "my little victory". He frowned deeply and described the following scenario...

"Suppose one of your competitors, who runs a rival business with an online store and, like you, is dependent upon the web to make a living, decides to screw you over - bigtime. What he does is buys a piece of spamming software, creates (for example) some really offensive porno spam messages, which contain links to your site and then mails it to the world. The people who receive it will be understandably shocked and those who have a punishment option on their anti-spam software may well decide that this is the time to use it.

The result ? All of a sudden, out of the blue, your site starts to experience something that, at first, appears to be a classic DoS attack, with squillions of clicks hitting your site's server and doing no business. You take steps to track down the source of the attack, but to your horror realise that it isn't coming from just one, or even a few computers, it's coming from thousands of computers all over the world and there is nothing you can do to stop it" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/drool.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/faint.gif

Alright, I've already used this function on the spam in my deleted folder, but now that I know this I will be very cautious about using it in the future. After all, there are enough features within Spam Bully to prevent the cursed stuff ever being a problem again (I hope) which, on reflection is all I really want to happen.

So beware, by "punishing those damn spammers", you could wind up as an unwitting pawn in someone else's sicko cyber game.

Its not really a dark side to punishing a spammer, its a software writer not being familiar with what is called a "joe job"

With the amount of mail bounce I get at moment, circa 00s a day, more than familiar with a `joe job`....

The f**kwit spamsters are now using adnmin contacts from whois? records to either send spam to or pretend it came from, a joe job.

Anything that costs confirmed spammers dear is good to me.

Adam

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lightnix said:
So beware, by "punishing those damn spammers", you could wind up as an unwitting pawn in someone else's sicko cyber game.

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No, it's not being an unwitting pawn. The ones using the program are being no one's pawn and know exactly what is occurring.

Technically, by some interpretations it's participating in a felony.

Just sign up at spameater.com

works like a champ so far for me

Wow, thanks for the input. I feel so thick, I've never actually heard of a Joe Job before /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ohgeez.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

On the plus side, I haven't used the bounce function on Spam Bully and they don't recommend it for everyday use, just for what they regard as "small scale" spammers, those sending unwanted messages, but at the same time offer genuine services.

I'll let Spam Bully run it's 14 day course and then try spameater. I'll write to SB in the meantime, making these points (although I suspect they have heard them already) and politely suggesting that they are possibly not improving the overall situation. I'll let you know what they say, if anything.

Thanks again.

That is why I believe that every piece of email, software, and spam sent to my computer should be able to be retraced. It should be mandatory. There are ways to do this. Why isn't it done.

Bravo,

That would certainly make the FBI really happy... Want a law to do this? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

-Bill

BB,
Nah, we have too many laws already.
Matter of fact, I would be quite pleased if they would repeal any and all laws that keep me from bustin' a cap on a known spammer.
I agree with Bravo25. Technically speaking, ALL e-mail can be traced. You and I just dont happen to have the resources to do it.

Yahoo! and Microsoft are giving serious thought to the idea of e-mail "postage" that costs senders a small fee, company officials said.

-Bill

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BB said:
Yahoo! and Microsoft are giving serious thought to the idea of e-mail "postage" that costs senders a small fee, company officials said.

-Bill

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They must have been reading my post on the subject. Charging the sender a fee seems the logical and fair way to do it.

Everything we do on the internet costs something. Charging each user for the costs he imposes on the internet makes sense. As things stand now, each of us is somehow paying the price for the enormous spam mail costs, and the spammers pay almost nothing.

The current situation is an open invitation for spammers to keep on spamming.

Well, if this is a privately implemented solution--it has possibilities...

However, I very much fear that the world governments are going to want to get in on the take.

And what about the poor grandmother whose computer gets hacked or is running an open relay service on a cable modem. They could be billed 100's of dollars per hour against their credit card/account.

There are, of course, ways to limit damage (only a few dollars of charges allowed before an account is blocked, etc.)...

But, if Microsoft and other large companies want to see bill per use... I would like to see bill per hack that causes network abuse... MS gets a worm that shuts down the internet--then they pay everyone's ISP bill for a day...

All of this sounds neat, but I fear that this will lead to more government oversight/taxes and cut down on the free flow of communications.

Continuing to resolve this issues as a private/technical matter (spam filters at ISP's, not accepting mail from open servers or those relaying mail from open servers, etc.) is the way I would like to go now. Make it the ISP/User's who provide the feedback (don't like spam support, change ISP's, ISP getting lots of grief from open relay's--subscribe to person that maintains a black list, etc.).

Want all the spam you can get, sign with an ISP that supports your needs.

-Bill

I hate to say it, but I kind of like the idea I was reading about from Microsoft the other day. Require the computer sending a message to perform some complex math calculation to sign it. If you receive a message from an unauthorized source without the proper calculations it is spam. Would require about 10s of processor time to sign the messages, which wouldn't be a big deal for someone sending 50 or 100 messages. It would stop one computer from sending more than about 86,000 messages a day which would greatly limit spammers.

Andy