On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 12:39:11AM -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote: > Every time I see a spam story on SlashDot I think how the SlashDot effect > could be used for good by getting everyone to visit the spammer's site and > take it to its knees, while driving up the spammer's bandwidth bill. [...] > It makes me wonder if there's some way to grab a random link from SURBL to > consume a spammer's bandwidth allocation.
This scheme has been suggested before. There are a couple of reasons why it's not a good idea... 1) Fighting abuse with abuse (essentially creating a DOS attack) is not IMO an acceptable solution to a problem, and makes the recipient of spam (who, believe it or not, may not know all the facts) judge, jury and executioner. 2) It makes it very easy for a spammer (or someone else) to indirectly DOS attack a target by sending out spam with the target's URL.
