Police Team Up With Guardian Angels Of The Net
from the defenders-of-the-net dept
Although politicians some times like to talk tough about cracking down on cyber-crime, there's little question that for the most part, law enforcement has been ineffective at doing much about it. There are all kinds impediments facing law enforcement bodies, such as jurisdictional issues and matters of scale (investigating and prosecuting an individual is an expensive, arduous task, while it's only getting cheaper and easier to launch attacks). The alternative, then, to traditional law enforcement is cyber-vigilantism. That was the idea behind Blue Security, a company whose strategy, some argued, amounted to launching denial-of-service attacks against spammers. Of course, Blue Security ultimately lost the battle, when, last summer, it came under a denial-of-service attack of its own launched by vengeful spammers. Increasingly, law enforcement is looking at a blended approach that combines legal methods alongside cyber-vigilantism. In London, the police have been joining up with such groups, although it's taking a cautious approach. The police, of course, want to be sure it's only allying with groups operating completely within the letter of the law, and its wary that wars between attackers and vigilantes could result in collateral damage to the networks that play the role of battleground. Still, it seems likely that such cooperation will continue. The traditional methods of the police force clearly seem inadequate, while the vigilantes should be able to benefit from a cloak of legitimacy that the police force can provide. The key will be in developing tools and practices to make the partnerships useful.
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Blue Security's strategy
Actually, their "strategy", if I might dignify something so poorly
conceived with that term, was to (a) launch attacks at targets they
believed to be spammers -- whether or not they were, and without
pausing for a moment to consider that spammers would of course
use deceptive mean to retarget those attacks and (b) attract a
lot of attention.
In the case of (a), I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they were
taken out via retargeting of their own attacks.
It's seems they're now leveraging (b) as they attempt to become
a spam-for-hire operation known as collactive.com.
Not a good model to follow.
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I dont mind fighting fire with fire.
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Re: fighting fire with fire
First, it adds positive feedback to a system that desperately needs
negative feedback in order to dampen the response.
Second, there is absolutely no chance of it working. NONE. Spammers
control computing and network resources so enormous, so distributed,
so fault-tolerant that they make what Google has look insignificant by
comparison. They also have some highly talented and very smart people
working for them -- oh, and they have access to data and code that the
rest of us don't.
Attempting to "fight fire with fire" may be emotionally satisfying,
but it's a major strategic blunder. There are other ways -- better ways.
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Formal Training ?
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just have'em shutdown .period
well let's all make a contract and send millions of mails out too wherever we find e-mails then this add selling business will go down, e-mail will become obsolete and who knows, net traffic will become impossible
but that's just what's happening already, i think here i can blame some large ISP's for providing free access to smtp services without quota (msg/day/MB) but this will kinda shut down all interest for a e-mail, who , imo has become obsolete, just use a chat program, drag/drop on person u want to send text/picture/application and let pc send-it when person becomes available and accepts-it... but this is just theory :)
so no more unwanted messages, just a message service, hey this person (real name id) wants to send you this including this attachment, do u want to accept, then no more mail servers needed, just some social net option, like kind of a telephone, but u can accept or not , before is getting sent to you, so spammer can't transmit nothing, but request for acceptance, and you get only whatever you need and want, list of off-line messages from people you know, or , if you want some from people you don't know, plus a few licensed add vendors, who can sell adds to social nets to display if you opt for (let's say this social net should have like a 1-2 $/month fee so they can hold service without you getting bugged by advertisers/spam/unwanted adds /etc....
and i think that should be the new aim for future messaging/mailing/ except maybe for internal corporate mail servers, running free inside private lan's
peek-a boo, no spam here :)
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The Computer Illiterate
If everyone expressed due diligence as they should while online with regards to anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewalls, the world (read internet) would be a much safer place.
However, I know the more time goes on, the more stupid people will leave severely vulnerable machines online more often. And, I realize that there are programs that cannot be found currently by other programs like anti-virus and such.
I am sure that it is impossible to secure everything and remove all of the bots.
I cannot say that the public is not informed, I see warnings about new viruses and stuff like that all the time.
I can only hope that in a generation or two when I am about 40 to 50 (depending on your definition of a generation), the world will be more technologically adept (see congress people examples from tech dirt for reasons behind that) and more secure. I feel I can say this by studies that were posted on the Wired site showing that the avg length and complexity of passwords has been increasing over time. And I also acknowledge that I cannot directly tie more complex passwords to increased computer security knowledge.
I am just hoping
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playing evilly
I ask for your forgiveness ahead of time, as this is not meant to flame you in any way.
With regards to advertisements, it is "ads", and adds would be mathematical.
Onto main topic for this added post:
We could just all fire bomb any company's stores and HQ that is proven to have paid for spammers to send out mass emails.
I bet they would stop sending them!
...
Either that or anyone they could advertise to would be in jail without email to check it, muhuhahaha!
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Re: Blue Security's strategy
On the other side of it I find it crewel to attack some one as I felt very threatened and I felt the hole world was against me ..I just want to know how to stop these so called bots from being used for malice and make sure I have this crap under control already.
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