Steve Bertrand wrote:
Finally, I would suggest that bombarding their purchasing forms with
valid-looking purchase data, might work better.
As someone who deals with the consequences of DoS attacks, I disagree
firmly with that approach, however...the above idea seems very
entertaining and I was LMAO when I read it...
There seems to be a very grey line here. The spammers send email containing
HREF or IMG tags that they fully intend to have the recipient click on, or in
the
case of IMG tags, to have an agent for the recipient (mail client) retrieve.
What is the difference between a recipient clicking on an HREF multiple times,
or
viewing the email (and loading the IMGs) multiple times, and an agent of the
recipient
performing similar actions? I don't think that at a fundamental level there is
a
difference.
If you publish anything on the web by any means the publisher has to accept
that the
slashdot effect is one of the possible consequences of publication.
I do suppose though that it boils down to an issue of intent. Viewing an email
and
its associated HREFs or IMGs is different than feeding these URLs to a process
with
the _intent_ that it consume large amounts of resources of the target.
Hmmm... Damn, its too bad because I like the idea. They use zombies and
spambots against
us, why can't we use similar systems against them!
- Mike
