Attacking the Spammers - Time to STRIKE BACK?

[Marc Perkel <ma...@perkel.com>]

Just a thought and perhaps a fantacy about getting even with spammers.

Once we get the URIBL technology down - it seems to me that were could 
act against the sites being advertized. For example - every spam that 
comes in could trigger an http request to the main home page. Or - an 
abuse email sent to the upline hosting company(s).

Anyone like where I'm going with this and/or can build in the idea?

Re: Attacking the Spammers - Time to STRIKE BACK?

[Sidney Markowitz <si...@sidney.com>]

Marc Perkel wrote:
> or can build in the idea?

Since you're talking about setting up a distributed DoS, which is 
illegal, it should not be built in, as then the developers might have 
some liability. You also don't want to have any one person who receives 
a spam sending out enough http requests to be accused of perpetrating a 
DoS all on their own.

One spam mailing may send out millions of messages, but we would be 
lucky if a million people were running SpamAssassin and participating in 
this. One million HTTP GET requests would not damage the spammer much, 
even if it caused a short spike that their site could not handle.

On the other hand, if each of those million spam victims donated only 
one dollar, that would be more than enough to hire a hit man through 
whatever organized crime syndicate exists in any country of residence of 
the spammer, perhaps enough to blow up the whole company. One dollar, 
one time, one spammer gone. Yes, it would be illegal, but so is the DDoS 
that you are proposing. Anyway, nobody is going to arrest a million 
people over this. You could even donate 10% of the money to the EFF, so 
everyone could have a clear conscience because nobody would know for 
sure if their dollar paid the hit man. Like the firing squad with random 
rifles containing blanks.

I do think this is outside the scope of SpamAssassin, despite the name 
of the project.

  -- sidney

[I feel that given the political climate of today and some possible 
future when these words are retrieved from an archive, I had better make 
very clear that the above message is satirical and has nothing to do 
with any real proposal to commit illegal violent acts of any kind, 
either electronic or physical.]