Fighting Spam With Spamalot

Dark Reading - Fighting Spam With Spamalot - Security News Analysis:

AUGUST 24, 2006 | If you've ever fantasized about hitting a spammer where he lives, check this out: Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have built an anti-spam toolkit that poses as duped spam victims and attempts to drain a spammer's resources.

The toolkit, called Spamalot, uses intelligent agents that interact online with the human side of the spammers, dragging out correspondence and providing false information, to derail spam scams (like the Nigerian 419 bank scheme) by flooding them with duped messages and replies. It also fills out spammed Web forms.

Hmmm fighting fire with fire huh?  This sounds like a good solution to the SPAM problem but I remember reading (and hearing) about an anti-spam company (Blue Security) that did something similar (they tried spamming the spammers) and ended up discontinuing the service because the spammers initiated a DDOS on its website.  When the anti-spam company tried to blog about its ordeal, the spammers also did a DDOS attack on the blog host (TypePad) used by the anti-spammer.

I for one will *not* employ this tactic to prevent SPAM.  I will instead continue to rely on my ever-reliable SPAMBAYES to continue filtering out unwanted mail from my mailboxes.

technorati tags:antispam, infosec

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