:s wrap 80-columns On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 02:04:45PM -0400, Dan Armstrong wrote:
I agree with you whole heatedly. Malicious attacks deserve severe consequences, and all ISPs need to set themselves up to be able to deal with them more quickly and effectively. We have had problems with these sort of things in the past. We have done all sorts of neat stuff including sending alarms if traffic trends change drastically, blackhole routing, etc. etc. That's a whole separate discussion, in my opinion.
These BLs that leveraged their "wild west" style, unaccountable vigilante justice by inflicting "collateral damage" to thousands of innocent victims got their karma back. I think it's a cop out to think that it was the spammers themselves who did this. Spammers are not smart enough to do things like that...... They are just money grubbing sleeze bags that play the numbers game. It is un-economic for them to use resources to organize a DDoS. A DDoS is an act of passion, not an act of dollars and cents, which is how the spammers work.
I think you misjudge the skill of the spammers. The fact that they are taking such actions as compromising machines, using wireless links to do their spamming from, and finding other interesting ways to leak their spam out on the networks is something that requires more skill than the average computer user out there. The NYT had a good article over the weekend that describes the techniques and skills of some of these spammers. See here: (free reg, or find the news.google link ...) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/28SPAMLT.html You're making a clear mistake in underestimating the skills of these people. While they may not be able to do it, these are people who have been fighting the dnsbl, filtering, SpamAssassin, bayesian filters and other such systems for years that are attempting to mitigate the loss of number of deliveries they can perform on a daily basis. There is some skill required for these people to realize that there are minor ways to tweak your text to get past filters, and to understand how these filters work... - Jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.