[vox-tech] spam current events

[Chris Jenks]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Micah J. Cowan wrote:

> Note that they don't do this anymore (this is mentioned at the end of
> the article). The spammers' response was effective enough to win them
> the battle :(
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/16/AR2006051601873.html

   I've been using the bayesian filter "spamprobe" for a few years now, and 
been very happy with it, but it crashed a few weeks ago, around the time 
more messages were slipping through (of the 100s per day I receive). I had 
to delete the database, which had grown to about 50MB, and start over, and 
since then it has been pretty effective. So I wonder if purging the 
database before the crash, to remove less relevant words, would also have 
restored the effectiveness of spamprobe.
   The torrent of spam I receive is mostly due to owning several domains 
and having their e-mail sent to my address. Since it gets on my nerves, 
I've been interested for the past several years in strategies - like the 
one described in the above article - to use the spam against the spammer 
to help reduce the problem on a global scale. The vulnerability I see in 
Blue Security's strategy is that their attack wasn't distributed, so they 
were an easy target for the spammers. Although the concept is rather 
gray-hat, the strategy I like most is to increase the cost of advertizing 
with spam by increasing traffic (and hosting fees) on the servers that 
host the spammer's web sites, without increasing sales. There are some web 
pages (such as Spam Vampire) that download images from spam advertized web 
sites and are very convenient to use, but filling those pages with links 
from my own spam is inconvenient. The best way I've found to make use of 
the links in my own spam is to extract them with a php script, screen out 
the innocent links as much as possible, and create shell scripts 
containing wget statements to be started with cron. These scripts can then 
be distributed easily and run on even tiny systems, like the Linksys 
WRT54G/S router under OpenWRT. It seems to me that if enough people 
chipped in that spammers would start moving on, and the remaining spammers 
would get even more unwanted traffic. I envision an extinction of spam, if 
this sort of strategy ever gets enough momentum.

   - Chris