Blue Security Gives up the Fight 672
bblboy54 writes "According to The Washington Post, Blue Security has closed its doors, which can be confirmed by the Blue Security application failing to work today and their domain no longer resolving. Blue Security's CEO is quoted in the article: "It's clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don't have the authority to start," Reshef said. "Our users never signed up for this kind of thing." You have to wonder where it goes from here. It seems an effective method has been found but more than a small private company could handle. Will someone else adapt this concept, or does the internet world give up?"
Re:The problem is it relies on a central server. (Score:5, Informative)
an attacker.
One of the nice attributes of having a central server is that BlueSecurity could validate
that the site was a legitimate target before unleashing the flurry of opt-out requests.
Re:Third Choice? (Score:5, Informative)
but anyone who's still getting spam in their inbox should install some nice filtering software.
That's not the point. If you run your own mail server or rely on filtering at your client end the spam uses up your bandwidth, your storage, your CPU resources to filter it, etc. Spammers like to use zombie machines around the net. Their operations cost them very little as they steal the capability from everyone else.
From their Website (Score:3, Informative)
Blue Security Ceases Anti-Spam Operations
When we founded Blue Security in 2004, we believed that if we automated a way for users to rise up and exercise their rights under the CAN-SPAM Act, we could reduce the amount of spam on the Internet.
Over the past few months we were able to leverage the power of the Blue Community and convince top spammers responsible for sending over 25% of the world's spam to comply with our users' opt-out list. We were making real progress in eliminating spam from the lives of our users.
However, several leading spammers viewed this change as a strategic threat to their spam business. The week before last, these spammers launched a series of attacks against us, taking down hundreds of thousands of other websites via a massive Denial-of-Service attack and causing damage to ISPs, website owners and Internet users worldwide. They also began a relentless campaign of email intimidation against many members of the Blue Community.
After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations.
As we cannot build the Blue Security business on the foundation we originally envisioned, we are discontinuing all of our anti-spam activities on your behalf and are exploring other, non spam-related avenues for our technological developments. As much as it saddens us, we believe this is the responsible thing to do.
You need not do anything as a result of this change. We will continue to protect your names and addresses and honor all privacy commitments we made to you.
We have concluded we should not take Blue Security to the full deployment stage we originally planned to achieve, but we are proud of what we have accomplished thus far as a young startup company.
We are extremely proud to have had the chance to work with such a devoted and dedicated community: thank you for the vote of confidence you gave us over the past few months as well as the particularly vocal support you have shown over the last two weeks.
We will be innovating and building our technology in new, other directions and will continue to give back to you, our Community.
Thank you for your support,
The Blue Security Team.
Re:Take a page from SETI (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Solving the Spam Bot problem (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Solving the Spam Bot problem (Score:5, Informative)
ISPs are using the blocking of outgoing smtp traffic on port 25 for this very reason. But to really shut down this problem the ISP would also have to be able to provide technical support to remove the virus, or atleast something of that nature. Let alone the customer won't even think their computer is infected (how could it be, i don't download anything!!?) and the flurry of angry phone calls would ensue.
We had users at my campus that had blocked ports for a month before we were able to get in touch with them, they just thought their computer was broken. Or we get a phone call from an angry parent whose little suzy or billy can't send them email and update their facebook.
The idea is possible, but it is a nightmare in reality to have to support.
Good riddence. It never really worked anyway. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:official statement (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When the going gets tough... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When the going gets tough... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, the amount of DOS the site gets should be comparable with the bandwidth needed to send the spams, so there are no abuses of the system. Just send their crap back to the sites they run.
That simply won't work because it will get exploited very easilly. I assume only links that have been submitted a large amount of times will get DDOSed. Someone will create a large amount of fake accounts on the P2P network, submit links to their target (or maybe spoof all the link submissions without needing to create fake accounts), and get a free DDOS network to attack whoever they want.
Re:Solving the Spam Bot problem (Score:5, Informative)
Because its in nobody's financial interest. A zombie computer causes most of its harm to other networks, not the one its on.
Most of the ISPs are now large telcos and cable companies who hire support staff at would-you-like-fries-with-that wages. They don't have the capacity or the incentive to disinfect a zillion Windows boxes. It's much cheaper to buy a bigger pipe.
Of course, Microsoft owns the root problem. They sold a supposedly consumer-grade operating system that consumers can't maintain. Windows needs a dialog box that says, "You computer has been invaded by evil fuckwads. Would you like to kick them out?" where the two choices are "Yes" and "Ok".
Re:Spammers are the wrong enemy (Score:2, Informative)
Um... which is exactly what they did?
Quote from their overview page [64.233.183.104]:
(emphasis mine)
They struck at the very core of the spammers' financing. Why else do you think the spammers reacted so violently? They had the right idea, just not the balls to see it through. Hopefully someone else can pick up the torch. If anyone knows of a service similar to Blue Frog, I would be very interested.
Re:This works . 100% effective in killing off spam (Score:2, Informative)
The police also examined another lead suggesting that Kushnir could have been attacked by robbers.
On Sunday the Moscow criminal investigation directorate detained a group of young people on suspicion of murdering Kushnir with a view to rob him. The investigators believe that a 15-year-old girl and two boys, 18 and 17 years of age, along with a 27-year-old accomplice had broke into Kushnirs apartment.
One of the boys wielded a baseball bat which he used to beat the man to death. The detainees insist Kushnir had invited them to his place himself where he made passes at the girl by the name of Vika. Her friends tried to stop him, then Kushnir grabbed a knife and the young men hit the man with an empty bottle on the head in order to defend themselves.
http://mosnews.com/news/2005/08/15/kushnirinquiry
Re:How? (Score:4, Informative)
I understand the idea was to SPAM the Spammers.
But who exactly did they span? The spoofed addresses? The owner of the original IP?
In the USA there is legislation that attempts to legitimise sending of unsolicited commercial email. This is the Can-Spam [wikipedia.org] act and says among other things that if you want to send such, you must provide an opt-out method for people who dont want to receive it.
Obviously this only applies to US businesses who want to send junk emails, but there are plenty of those - and they think that because they follow the rules and provide an opt-out that its legitimate business.
Now, these companies contact or are contacted by somebody who is willing to send out bulk emails on their behalf for a fee. Often this turns out to be a scumbag bot operator in another country and as such is not subject to the US rules. These guys are beyond any law except the law of supply and demand.
What the Blue Frog people did was set up a system where you could forward junk mails to them, and they would discover the originating business and automatically fill out an opt-out request for you. This costs the US companies who are trying to run a business time and money to process and makes it less attractive for them to pay the spam kings to send the bulk mail and thus reduces demand.
Less demand is less money for the spam king and one or more (I would not be surprised to find a cartel) decided to attack Blue Frog.
Re:Theology (Score:3, Informative)
His point was that my point contained a logical inconsistency, whereas your point, and correct me if I'm wrong here, was that preaching to everyone who one would happen to meet on the streets was a moral imperative, and the refusal of the passerby to listen would necessarily encompass the destruction of their nation, or a 40' drop, depending.
While I view his post as a bit of a logical nit-pick, as he is clearly willfully missing my point of tolerance, I view your post as a good example of the sort of obstinate "I'm right and you're wrong" arrogant, and intractible belief system that I'm talking about. God very clearly spelled out his command to Israel in the OT, and they skipped it, and paid the price. Well and good.
I am unaware of any modern commands so explicitly laid out. All modern imperatives, in fact, seem to be originating with a group of intolerant demagogues who remind me much more of Pharisees than Christians, who preach out of temples with built-in ATMs and gift shoppes, while claiming, with no sense of shame, to be in complete understanding of the mind of god.