On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Jack Gostl wrote: > By the way, there is an interesting article on "fighting back" by Paul > Graham called "Filters That Fight Back." > > http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html > > He basically suggests culling URLs from spam and kicking off something > like wget to retrieve them. If enough people did that, you would have > what amounts to a DDOS attack on the people who pay the spammers.
Given that spammers are now using hijacked machines as HTTP proxy servers, you're more likely to DDOS several dozen poor schmucks' home cable modem connections, and the intended target of the attack will never see more than a fraction of the traffic. And because the spammers rotate their DNS across the proxies fairly rapidly, you probably won't even DDOS any given schmuck long enough for them to notice. Meanwhile, the spamrun will have appeared to the target to be wildly successful, and they'll be eager to pay for another one. And everyone who set up the auto-wget will have confirmed that their address is live and deliverable. And undoubtedly some people will have set this up wrong and "clicked" on the "yes, I did subscribe" links in signup confirmation notices sent by legitimate mailing lists in response to worms flooding their subscribe auto-responders, etc., etc. Why do Razor, SpamCop, et al. make a point of discouraging automated submissions? Fighting abuse with abuse is not the answer. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. SourceForge.net hosts over 70,000 Open Source Projects. See the people who have HELPED US provide better services: Click here: http://sourceforge.net/supporters.php _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
