
1 Billion Spammers Served - Deep Insights into Spam - mcantor
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php
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thinkbohemian
As the developer of user level spam prevention suite <http://www.whyspam.me>
and a frequent user of mailinator and the like. We need all hands on deck to
really shine a light on spammers and to highlight the companies out there
doing a great job!!

Keep up the good work honeypot, here's to the next billion!

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ryanelkins
I wonder where lines are drawn in regards to spam when it comes to net
neutrality. I remember listening to an owner of a local ISP talk about how how
spam could easily overrun their capacity to serve paying customers if they
couldn't control what was moving over their bandwidth. It's a side of net
neutrality that most people don't seem to consider.

2.5 petabytes is a quite a bit of bandwidth being eaten up.

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nzmsv
I suppose an ISP's customer could opt-in to receive spam. I'm sure there will
be many takers :)

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brown9-2
I like how the #1, 3, 4 and 5th most frequently seen spam subjects are ads for
increasing hits to a website - in other words, spam messages for sending ...
more spam.

(I assume that something like "Feed Blaster" or "Hit Blaster" is really just a
spam sender at it's heart)

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marze
It seems a potentially effective approach to phishing scams would be to set up
a huge network of honeypots and do automatic responses to the phishing servers
with bogus information.

At that point, you could try to swamp the real account info with the bogus, or
you could also inform the financial institutions what the bogus info was so
they could watch for it and set up sting operations.

Does anyone know if this type approach is used, and if not why?

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alextp
This is very hard to do; you'd probably have to write a bot to feed reasonable
but false data into random forms, and then coordinate it.

You'd also be wasting a lot of bandwidth; in this sense it is as useless as
those "let's DDOS them back!" approaches to fight spam.

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ars
Blue Security did exactly that with it's
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog> program.

It was very very effective. So effective that spammers got together and DOS'd
them, to the point that they were forced to shut down.

No one (currently) is willing to try it again. A P2P version designed to
handle a DOS was attempted, but never went anywhere.

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wmeredith
What a story! Thanks for the link.

If they really did find the solution to Spam and were killed for it, it's a
wonder that someone with deep pockets, think Google or MSoft doesn't do this
again with monstrous bandwidth and power behind it. It would be costly, but
imagine the PR win for removing spam from the internet.

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raheemm
If smtp could be linked to an iTunes style payment processing system, those
billion spam messages would result in $10 million (assuming a penny per email)
and quite possibly reduction in spam.

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lucifer
If smtp could be replaced ...

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ilamont
I wonder why the government hasn't actively gone after the "harvesters" in the
U.S. If this report is correct, they seem to play a very active and important
role in the global spam ecosystem.

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dkokelley
Harvesters are in a sort of legal grey area, from what I can tell. If the
information is publicly available, then why shouldn't anyone be allowed to
access it, or use technology to automate access? I'm sure that Google has
millions of email addresses from crawling sites alone.

Of course there are more obvious methods that are clearly illegal, and I agree
that the governments should enforce the laws more actively.

