Spammers use web attacks to stop anti-spam effort

BBC has the interesting story of an Israeli firm that was working for clients who wanted their names taken off the spammer's lists. Here is how it worked:

"Blue Security set up the Blue Frog anti-spam scheme in July 2005 and since then has signed up more than 500,000 members.

If this method of stopping spam failed, Blue Security would then visit the spammer's websites advertising the products seen in junk mail and fill in any forms asking for users' names be removed from the list.

This could mean that some spammers' websites were getting thousands of requests for mailing lists to be cleaned up every day.

Blue Security claimed that the scheme reduced spam for many of those that signed up. "

Unfortunately it angered the spammers.

The spammers responded by linking numerous computers to conduct a denial of service attack on the Bule Frog server and by sending threatening e-mails to the individuals who were using Blue Frog to get their names removed from the spam lists.

Blue Frog has stopped its anti-spam program for fear of contributing to an escalating war on the internet.

I don't know if they are correct to stop. If the war really escalated, the spammers whould ultimately lose it, and any spammer after that could be attacked out of existence. But Blue Frog would have to call on a lot of allies to win.

You know, allies who have been spammed and hate it enough to fight back?