BlackFrog to Take up BlueFrog's Flag

Runefox writes "ZDNet UK has a story about a new SPAM defense mechanism called BlackFrog, a response to the demise of Blue Security's BlueFrog. According to the article, the new service is based on a P2P network of clients, called the 'Frognet', which allows the opt-out service to continue functioning even after a server has gone down, making a DDoS attack like that which crippled BlueFrog ineffective against the new service."

Re:Excuse me, but

[Billosaur]

isn't this really good botnet vs bad botnet?

More like Autobots vs Decepticons, but in the end it's the same thing. The "good" forces won't be a botnet per se, but a loosely aligned group of people doing the same thing, taking on a group with coordinated resources capable of wreaking terrible havok. It's vigilantism to be sure, but until the government of the world actually get their heads out of their butts and come up with a unified and mutually beneficial set of laws to deal with spammers wherever they live, this is the only tool anyone has to even try and slow the spammers down.

Security?

[Rob T Firefly]

This does look promising (from TFA:)

"It will be based on a P2P network (the frognet)," according to a posting on the wiki. "On failure to connect it could still opt out given email addresses."

Participants will send reports of spam emails to Okopipi, which will use "handlers", including dedicated servers, to analyse it. To avoid suffering the same fate as Blue Security, Okopipi's staff will not disclose information about its servers.

"Only the Okopipi administrators will know their locations," the group said on its wiki. This should make a DDoS attack "very difficult", it said.

That seems solid, but I wonder how something so open can keep a secret like what and where its servers are. It's beyond me, anyone have more info?

Re:Link

[WhiplashII]

To get the same effect in a perfectly legal and unstoppable way, alter Mozilla and other email clients so that when you click on the junk button it automatically goes and fills out form, etc - without accessing a separate server. That way, they get a response from each person solicited or spammed (prefectly reasonable) and they have to sort through the responses to find the ones that fell for the scam.

Many people will say that if you do this the spammers will know your address. My response: 1) they obviously already know your address, and 2) if everyone does it, it won't help that they know your address. The point is not to make you personally get less spam, the point is to eliminate spam as an easy option for criminals.

Re:Link

[Smidge204]

1) they obviously already know your address

Maybe, maybe not. They have your e-mail in a list somewhere, but they don't know if it's still valid. Sending a real response proves that it IS valid and IS checked actively, which increases its value when sold to advertisers or sold/traded to other spammers.

NOT replying puts a little "?" on the message, because they know the address is probably still valid (didn't bounce) but there was no reply (maybe nobody checks it)?

I think the better solution would be to send forged bounce errors back to the sender in hopes that they'll think the e-mail is dead, and remove it from their list.
=Smidge=