Blue Security gets spammer testimonial
The Blue Security has been hit with a DDOS attack today, and a percentage of their members have received extortion spam e-mails.
They’ve obviously rattled the spammers enough for them to strike back.
Makes me tempted to check out this whole thing… Blue Security (don’t expect the site to work as I’m posting this)
Here’s a writeup about the extortion:
Update:
Might I suggest for our admin friends here that they find the most heavily spammed defunct e-mail address on their system? Install Blue Frog on a computer, then let it churn through the spam? Leave your own e-mail address out of it if you like, but I have to say I’m sorely tempted… My servers reject so much mail to start with, it’s hardly worth the effort, but if I had an old spammed address… wait, I think I have one laying around somewhere….
May 2nd, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Yeah, would be cool to hear the Spam Huntress’s opinion on Blue Sec! (And our cute little mascot Fred.)
I for one love ‘em and I’m proud to have seen my spam jump from 200 a day to 500 yesterday. (May 1) Boy we’ve really made them mad! Feels good! More opt outs to send! It will have a nasty boomerang effect when they start getting the opt outs from this latest flood.
And the great news? This is no extra effort for me. 200 spams or 500. It’s the same bother. And I’ve got a lucrative day job which means I can keep up the fight for the rest of my life. Spammers though are losing money every time they mess with me or another member. They’ll need to go get jobs at McDonalds to pay their ISP bills soon!!
But sadly - I think that the combination of Spammer DDOS attacks and getting a big write up on SlashDot has overloaded the Blue Sec. servers today. I was on their forum at about 2AM Eastern US last night so it must have began this AM. Still down as of 16:00.
I’m looking forward to reading what happened when they come back online! The suspence in this DDOS outage is killing me…. The Blue Sec. guys always post interesting & intelligent reads.
May 2nd, 2006 at 3:19 pm
This only proves just how successful this tactic actually is against the spammers. So now they’re reduced to threats. Great! Now whenever Blue Security, the FTC or anyone else goes after them: they’ll have this additional barrage of threatening emails to use as ammunition proving that spammers are (as we always suspected) criminals.
What kind of legitimate businessperson would EVER act this way towards anyone they were legitimately attempting to market to? It just doesn’t make any sense. If they just stopped spamming people we wouldn’t even be in this situation.
I won’t even start about the contents of some of their messages. They make it sound like WE’re the ones breaking the law. What a bunch of total pathetic idiots.
Kidos to the likes of Spam Huntress for taking the stand that you do against this kind of scum.
SiL
May 2nd, 2006 at 3:58 pm
I hate spam and I think spammers are worthless losers, but I could never let my computer be used to send out DDOS attracts, regardless of how much I hate spam or how good the intent is of those fighting it. If I actively participated in DDOS attracts, it would make me no better than the worthless losers sending the spam. In fact, it would make me worse than the low-life spammer simply because it does more damage and not just for the spammer.
I understand the desire to fight back but launching a DDOS attract would be a never-ending battle without a clear winner. The only way spam will ever be stopped is when those receiving the spam stop clicking on the link or stops buying the products/services the spammers are marketing. You can not put yourself in the position of do-gooder and then participate in a DDOS attract. There’s just to wide a gap between the intent and the action.
May 2nd, 2006 at 4:30 pm
A DDOS is a relentless barrage.
One fill of a form per spam received by me? I don’t call that DDOS. Sure, in enough numbers it may amount to that. But I didn’t ask to receive the spam, so you could say the spammers have already wasted my resources. So if I waste a tiny amount of their resources, I’m not liable for any DDOS attack.
So at least be reasonable when you talk about this.
May 2nd, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Administrator is right. It’s not a DDOS attack. Hey, if someone sends me email I have the right to reply to it. If they can’t handle it, that’s their problem. Maybe they shouldn’t send out email to millions of people. Maybe they should try to earn an honest living instead of trying to make a buck by harassing people. Maybe they should grow up and accept some responsibility.
Kudos to Blue Security.
May 2nd, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Another point I should make: Blue Security has the frog send replies to the spammer’s email as a last resort. They first attempt to negotiate with the spammer to get him to run their listwasher to remove Blue Security members from their list. Only when that fails do they have the frog send a single email in reply to each spam received (and only for those users who actually received the spam). Again, it’s not remotely a DDOS attack. Someone sends me an email, the frog, on my behalf, sends an email in response saying to leave me alone. Perfectly fair.
Don’t believe the FUD these crybabies are trying to spread.
May 2nd, 2006 at 6:15 pm
I’m only going by what was said on the site you referenced, since I have no personal knowledge of what is actually done or how.
May 2nd, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Spam Huntress,
Blue Security has a free domain protection service too.
May 2nd, 2006 at 10:59 pm
glo
BlueSec sends a maximum of one opt-out request per spam reported. This is not a DDOS. It is a semi-automated unsubscribe request.
Also, these only go to the sites of spammers after careful analysis. It is not automatic, and not every message received generates such an action. Many are reported directly to the FSA, FBI, software vendors, etc instead.
This is unlike the DDOS attack on bluesecurity.com today, which is largescale, directed, and clearly illegal. As well as pointless.
May 3rd, 2006 at 6:59 am
I am new to Blue Security and my reporting agent has worked fine uninterrupted. Its website is now accessible, but I think it is intermittent. http://community.bluesecurity.com/ If you go there, you will see a blog entry with over 60 replies.
Also to note, someone or someone’s script has posted hundreds of nonsense posts on the newsgroup NANAE. http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email?lnk=lr&hl=en
I have never seen that happen before, but then again, I am not a regular reader of NANAE.
May 3rd, 2006 at 8:19 am
Okay, I understand now. I might even sign up, though I don’t get much spam anymore.
Thanks!
May 3rd, 2006 at 3:19 pm
You know after using blue frog for several months I’ve seen my spam decline to a mere trickle maybe a handfull of spams every few days A few days ago I started seeing a dramatic increase in spam. At least now I have something worth reporting and I’m enjoying the sense of being able to contribute to the fight against spam and being able to see the act of desparation being shown by spammers. The way I see it bring it on, you’re just giving me more spam to report and blue frog makes it soooo easy.
May 3rd, 2006 at 3:34 pm
My0,
Unfortunately NANAE getting slammed is nothing new, happens most of the time. In this case it’s hipcrime issuing crap because life has been unfair to him, he didn’t get enough hugs, etc.
May 4th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
This atrticle in The Register shows that Blue Security managed to ineptly knock Six Apart’s web hosting services offline.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/05/04/blue_security_dos_flak/
Blue Security offloads DoS attack o”nto blogs
By John Leyden 4 May 2006 16:18
Junk mail registry cops flak
A denial of service attack against Blue Security, distributors of a controversial anti-spam system, has taken the firm’s site offline. Mistakes in the firm’s response to the attack are been linked to a traffic flood that took numerous blogs offline too.
[…]”
May 4th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
This Blue Security attack continued to snowball. Livejournal was knocked offline for several hours yesterday because Blue Security redirected their domain to its livejournal blog. Some larger US based ISPs were affected by this DDoS as well, but I cannot locate that link right now.
http://news.com.com/Cyberattack+knocks+millions+of+blogs+offline/2100-7349_3-6068344.html?tag=st.rn
Netcraft has some interesting news too:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/05/03/ddos_on_blue_security_blog_knocks_typepad_livejournal_offline.html
May 4th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/05/04/blue_security_dos_flak/
This attitude shows that the www is now controlled by somebody who is capable of performing a massive DDoS.
This article gives me a bade taste, why blaming Blue Security and not the group performing this DDoS?
All energy should be used to show up this DDoS performer, instead of blaming the group who irritaded him.
May 5th, 2006 at 4:50 am
Keep in mind they also got slashdotted, which would bring most normal websites down within minutes. But if they did in fact DDOS Blue Security, that’s of course despiccable.
May 6th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
I have been a member of blue frog since january. For the first 2 months there was no change in spam volume, hovering about 30-40 a day. Before this attack was carried out, the spam volume was down to 5-6 a day.
For the frog to work, you need to let the application and community propogate your email address out to the spammers. It won’t happen instantaneously, but there is a spam volume tracker on the blue frog website that tracks how many spams you report.
People are blaming Blue Security for redirecting the attack to an old SixApart blog , but you have to understand that someone in a very high position disconnected Blue Security’s main website from the rest of the internet. While this was occuring almost all of the support servers from Blue Security were knocked out. Up until an hour AFTER Blue changed their domain to point to the blog there was no dDoS on bluesecurity.com
It was only after the change that the attack came. I suspect that the dns unlinkage was the primary attempt at disabling the services of Blue Frog, but when they switched to the blog to let their users know what was going on, the spammer probably put a backup plan into effect that started the dDoS, OR that he had planned to do it all along, but the timing was too difficult to pull off in conjunction with the attacks on the support servers.
Blue Frog works and spammers are scared. Whoever does not back down is in the path of a rapidly growing community that is very angry at having to deal with so much junk in their mail boxes.