Re: regarding spam...

[Crispin Cowan <crispin () wirex com>]

Kalat, Andrew (ISS Atlanta) wrote:

> To Marcus' point later in the thread, this doesn't really hurt the spammers,
> and this would likely start the same type of arms race you see in the
> anti-virus efforts, but it does help the business user population somewhat,
What WOULD hurt the spammers is a spam filter designed to be deployed as 
an EGRESS filter for large domains. I get an obnoxious amount of spam 
from the same domains time and time again.  Some of them are free 
webmail servers (hotmail.com, yahoo.com, mail.com, etc.) while others 
are obscure Asian ISPs (263.net comes to mind). The clear pattern that 
emerges is:

   * these large providers are not actually suborning spamming
   * but they *are* supporting so many users and/or giving out accounts
     so liberally that they cannot effectively police them

If there was a product that such large providers could deploy at their 
gateway that filtered *outgoing* mail, and the only thing it did was to 
bounce a copy of suspected outgoing spam back to the senders inbox, then 
a spammer's inbox would fill to bursting almost immediately, and the 
provider could lock out their account from sending any more mail until 
the issue was resolved.

Throw-away yahoo/hotmail/mail.com accounts would be a lot less cost 
effective if they could only send 10 spams each before they locked out.

I know: this requires very low margin providers to expend more effort, 
and we already know that they don't put much effort into spam fighting. 
This egress filter proposal is an attempt to minimize their effort 
required for effectivenss, and thus hopefully reduce their costs in 
dealing with spam cleanup efforts, e.g. the thousands of complaints that 
pour in after a large spam incident.

Presumably some of the readers out there are in companies in the content 
filtering business. Consider this a product opportunity.

Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com
Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html


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