RE: Red Herring Profile: Blue Security Spams Spammers

[Dave Dittrich <dittrich () u washington edu>]

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Aditya Deshmukh wrote:

> > Interesting profile on Blue Security over on Red Herring:
>
> How do they make money out of DDOS'ing the spammers ?
> Interesting concept, but what is their business model?
> The article does not make this clear....

There is no business model, unless you can call retaliation a business
model.  They are simply trying to find a simple way to ruin
the business model of the spammers.  My guess is they are making the
same mistakes as Lycos in their "Make Love Not Spam" campaign of not
understanding the business of spamming, not understanding the
effectiveness/limitations of their own "solution", not understanding
the spammer's tactics and capabilities, and not understanding the
ethical/legal issues of taking action outside the legal process.  I
hate spam as much as anyone, but most of these efforts are just wrong.
I gave a "lightning talk" at CanSecWest this year analysing Lycos'
attempt:

        http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/talks/core05-arc-ethics.ppt

The most telling point to me in the article is the description of the
founder as a "serial entrepreneur."  That's a nice way of saying,
"someone who has failed multiple times at creating a viable business."

--
Dave Dittrich                           Information Assurance Researcher,
dittrich () u washington edu               The iSchool
http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich    University of Washington

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