> 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!
AFAIK, one of the ideas to get rid of the spam (yes only one) is to clean up the crap clogging the pipes. Fighting fire with fire (or in this case bytes with bytes) will just make worse the traffic jams we have to deal with. Save the load on the infrastructure, and instead, tie them up in a chair in their house, then set the house on fire or something. Partially kidding of course. If we must continue this approach, a much more elegant and clean way to do this is hack the boxes the mail is being spewed from, the boxes the sites reside on, and implement a good strategy to have the mail servers bombard themselves with email, and have the web servers pollute their own databases with corrupt data. This will at least save the bandwidth for better things...like mailing list rants like this ;o) /* Disclaimer... I am in no way in any proper frame of mind right now. I can not be held accountable for actions taken in part, or in whole based on the ideas or thoughts contained in this email */ :o) Steve > > - Mike > > > > >
