rocketeddy

How much do you hate spam? If it's anywhere near as much as I do, then you'd be forgiven for thinking of Blue Security as heroes. "Who are they?" I hear you cry. You haven't heard of them? Sadly, neither had I. And now it's a little too late.

Apparently, Blue Security is an Israeli (internet) security firm, who had a particular hatred of spammers. So they signed up half a million customers who wanted to stop receiving spam . and contacting the spammers responsible, asking them to stop. If they didn't stop, they used automated software to fill in forms on their spammers' websites asking for their clients to be removed from lists. All sounds fair enough and quite simplistic, huh? After all, it's just automating what the customers were entitled to do themselves, right?

Well because they were a single focal point co-ordinating this, some spammers' websites were getting thousands of requests for mailing lists to be cleaned up every day. Some people were unhappy with this, including some anti-spam workers. I can't think why. We've campaigned hard to force spammers to provide these kinds of website forms in the hopes that we can fill them in to stop receiving unwanted emails. So why not allow a company to act as broker and save you the time filling them in all the time?

Unsurprisingly, Blue Security was targetted by insidious (and illegal) tactics too, including DDoS attacks (bombarding a server with data until it cant cope and shuts down). Do you remember a little while back LJ was offline for a short time, due to a DDoS attack? Well that was the work of PharmaMaster, and was part of his attack on Blue Security - their blog was hosted at TypePad.

The worst of all, is that the unscrupulous people we've all hated for so long have won.

"We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations"

The company has discontinued its anti-spam efforts.
I cannot agree more with The Register's closing statement in their article on the subject.

Blue's decision to shut up shop is understandable but regrettable, because it represents a significant victory by a spammer in the fight to control the internet. In effect, PharmaMaster has succeeded in his main aim of getting Blue Security to dismantle.

But perhaps all is not yet lost. After all, geeks don't go down without a fight... and there are "ethical hackers" who may take exception to this. Some people on slashdot are talking about how to improve the tactics Blue Security were employing already...

Sources:
BBC
The Register
channelregister