Originally published July 31 2005
Start-up company plans to stop spammers with complaints
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A new startup security firm is planning to stop spam by creating a Do-Not-Intrude registry. Because users have the right to complain, this registry directs complaints and unsubscribe requests directly back to spammers, slowing down operations and crippling their websites.
A startup security firm is taking the fight to spammers by enlisting end users to create what's called a Do-Not-Intrude registry whose purpose is to make it too painful for junk mailers to operate.
If a spammer sends you spam, you have a right to complain, said Eran Reshef, the chief executive of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Blue Security.
It's the volume on which spam operates and Blue Security's plan hinges.
Starting Monday, users can download Blue Security's Blue Frog client and sign up with the Do-Not-Intrude registry.
Once the software's installed, users can register up to three e-mail addresses to monitor for spam.
Blue Security, however, watches not only those addresses but up to a dozen accounts it sets up for that act as additional "honeypots," or accounts designed to attract spam.
Blue Security analyzes the messages it receives from the users' accounts (as well as all others who sign up), then follows the links inside the spam to (hopefully) the originating site where, for instance, products or services pitched by the junk mail are sold.
The idea, said Reshef, is to punish the spammer for his actions.
Although the scheme doesn't generate mail to the spammer -- spam for spam, so to speak -- the volume of Web traffic should be enough to cripple the spammer's Web site.
The opt-out complaints are synchronized, so that all users whose accounts are monitored file simultaneously.
Last year, Lycos Europe rolled out a screensaver that conducted DoS attacks against known spammers.
Within days, however, Lycos buckled under pressure from security groups -- which called it vigilantism -- and ISPs, who worried that attacks originating from their members would make them liable to legal action on the part of spammers.
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