Botnet Mafia in Online Turf War

An anonymous reader writes " The kind of turf war seen in the real world by drug gangs is being replicated by the criminal gangs behind spamming botnets, and things are turning nasty."

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the UK ISPs routinely cut off people if their machines are spewing spam (or other malware). The first thing most users know is when any web page they try and visit takes them to an ISP page telling them to run some malware scanning software.

Rich.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[TeXMaster]

Oh I'll just love it when my ISP blocks my internet connection because I just sent a patchset by email to a *-devel list for peer review.

I know the good intentions and all that, but seriously, I'm already pissed enough at my ISP (Tiscali.it) that doesn't allow me to send more than 3 consecutive emails.

So either implement this kind of stuff with a proper way to tell spam sending from acceptable mass mailing, or be ready to handle hordes of very angry customers.

Re:Trying to care

[Anonymous Coward]

You're lucky then. All it takes is for your address to end up in some other person's email client, and they become infected with a spam harvester bot of some kind. It's not as if you even have to communicate with that person. Some fool can forward a crap joke to everyone they know, chances are they won't use bcc:, resulting in your address being sent to a fair number of people.

 

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[asninn]

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, people are lazy, but switching to a different ISP is more of a hassle than running a virus/malware scanner; even if you're really computer-unsavvy, you'll probably have a child, sibling, cousin or friend who knows a bit more about computers and can do it for you.

And I still haven't seen any mail protocol proposals that would both cut down on spam in an effective fashion as well as not interfere with legitimate mail and not violating non-technical requirements like privacy etc.

Seriously, spam is a semantic problem, in a way; something that is spam for one person or in one situation need not be spam for someone else or in another situation. I'm signed up for a handful of company newsletters informing me about special offers etc., for example, and those aren't spam (since I signed up for them), but if I received them without having signed up, I'd definitely consider them spam. How is a mail delivery protocol supposed to be able to distinguish between these situations?

Re:Somehow...

[Fordiman]

Ah, get over it.

I'm actually *related* to italian mafioso (though not involved), and I don't give a half-shit about this. Mafia implies italians about as much as Nazi implies germans. It's a specific group of Not-Very-Nice people, and these days, they're of any race creed or color. Use it in that fashion and the implication fades.

No, seriously. If your offended, your oversensitive. Shut up and deal with it.

oblig checklist

[remmelt]

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, asshole! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[hlprasad]

I suggest you to have a look at the site Project Honey Pot (http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php [projecthoneypot.org]), also discussed in a previous Slashdot post 'http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/14/20 30202 [slashdot.org]'. It looks great! ISPs should install this in their sites, which should solve the problem quite simply. That's it!