IBM Believes In Spam For A Spam Vigilante Revenge

from the denial-of-service,-anyone? dept

It seems that larger companies are really getting pissed off at spammers these days. While going out and attacking spammers used to be more limited to net.vigilantes, some well known companies have been taking stronger approaches to fighting spam lately. A few months back there was Lycos' plan to let anyone download a screensaver that would launch distributed denial of service attacks on spammers. While Lycos claimed it wouldn't take anyone offline, it wasn't long before that was proven false. Next up on the list is IBM, whose latest anti-spam offering will send data right back at spamming machines in an effort to slow them down. It's not quite a distributed denial of service attack -- it's more like a centralized one. It's sort of one step up beyond greylisting which just slows down the spam. Instead, this tries to slow down the computer sending the spam. Again, this leaves IBM open to charges of hitting back too hard -- especially if innocent sites get taken offline in the process. Still, when large companies like IBM start offering products like this, you know that people are getting fed up.
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  1. identicon
    Kevin, 22 Mar 2005 @ 4:26pm

    bad writing Mike


    Maybe you indended this Mike but it seems like you are saying greylisting just slows down the spam. Not sure if you mean "the next step from greylisting proposed by microsoft just slows down the spam", or greylisting doesnt work it just slows down the spam transmission, or that 'slowing' to you means "decreasing". Either way, I've found greylisting to be very effective against small spammers and offer it for my antispam service.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    William Keeley, 21 Jun 2005 @ 8:55pm

    Make Love Not Spam Reloaded

    I was disapointed that Make Love Not Spam was taken offline. I decided to make a signed java archive that did basically the same thing as the flash verion on the webpage. I include the source code within the archive so that people can see that I am not doing anything untoward.
    http://www.plaza1.net/SpammerSlapper
    People are welcome to use this applet on their page as well. I want the code to be GPL.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Brett, 20 Sep 2006 @ 9:44am

    Relevant article

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    wankers, 3 Sep 2008 @ 5:50pm

    info

    tell us more...

    link to this | view in thread ]


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