There’s an interesting major Internet battle going on right now.
There’s a company called Blue Security. (I won’t provide a link because they are down.) People can download their software (the Blue Frog) which sends emails to spammers whenever they receive a spam message. This overloads the spammers server, slowing them down or halting them.
Several major spammers have cried “Uncle” and agreed to remove everybody who uses Blue Frog from their email list, but one evil entity has instead starting fighting back. He somehow figured out how to send multiple messages to many of the people who use Blue Frog, telling them that they were going to keep receiving these until they turned off the Frog. He also has brought the Blue Security web site down with a “DDOS” (Distributed Denial of Service) attack; basically forcing many diverse computers to overload the Blue Security site. Basically, what he is saying is “You must accept my spam. You cannot refuse it. If you try to refuse it, I will send you even more.”
Blue Security has been down for a couple of days now. This guy is pretty sophisticated.
You can read more about this here and here.
Somehow, we have to take back the internet from the spammers and scammers. Perhaps this will be a wake-up call to do some long-needed modifications to email to make it more traceable and controllable.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Mom // May 4, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Between noon today and 9:00 PM, I received 225 pieces of junk mail. Thank goodness for my junk file, so that I don’t have to even look at them. It’s still a nuisance to have to delete so often.
I hope the guys with the white hats win this battle.
2 Donna // May 7, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Boy, I hope they do, too. This sounds encouraging at least. I have to hope that someday we’ll have something to give the common user the choice whether to allow this or not. The war against phone solicitation brought first caller id, and then the “do not call” registry. With the masses of people and companies on one side against the few who think spamming is a great way to make a living (or at least tick off the rest of the world), someone will come up with something to finally put an end to it.
3 Donna // May 7, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Daryl, have you/will you download the Blue Frog?
4 Daryl // May 7, 2006 at 10:28 pm
I have and am running it. Not long enough to give a report yet, though.
5 Richard // May 9, 2006 at 7:35 pm
How long do you need to run it before you know if it is having an effect? I would like to put Dianna and I on the opt out list. Between us we are getting over 100 spams a day. She gets 80 and I get 20.
6 Daryl // May 9, 2006 at 9:56 pm
I have read people saying that it takes a month or more with the Blure Frog to see an effect. Some people are more enthusiastic than others. It doesn’t seem to be working quite right this week as they recover from the DDoS attack
The danger is if this renegade spammer somehow cracks the list, he has threatened to inundate everyone on it with spam, as a kind of revenge. I don’t know how realistic that is.
I think I will contact Rackspace (our hosting company) to see if they can upgrade SpamAssassin. We are on a much earlier version, and the upgrade may help.
Mom’s spam is so bad that she is changing her address.
7 Donna // May 10, 2006 at 6:15 pm
I installed the Blue Frog last night myself. I figure I’m getting so much spam, I’m almost ready to change my email address, too. So if I get hit by the renegade, I won’t be much worse off than I already am. And who knows, it may work! That’d be beautiful.
BTW, thanks for the server spam training info. This seems promising, too.
8 Don // May 18, 2006 at 6:31 am
Blue Security has shut down their website and stopped the anti-spam business.
link here
9 Daryl // May 18, 2006 at 8:14 am
That’s a shame. It shows how powerful the spammers have become, kind of like organized crime.
They now recommend that you remove the Blue Frog from your computer as soon as possible, because if anyone else gets control of the server on the other end they could find a way to control your computer.
Read here.