Not, not the singing vikings. This is about a new strategy to fight the ubiquitous – and ever growing – flood of spam mail (and in the blogosphere, the comment and trackback spam). Instead of trying to block spam messages, there are a couple of people taking a completely different tack: they are taking down the spammers' websites.
For years, spam haters have relied on junk-mail filters and Internet blacklists, but lately, some are saying it's time for a change in tactics.
Their answer: follow the money. And that means going after the Web sites where spammers sell their pharmaceuticals and watches and male enhancement products.
Misguided or not, it's pretty easy to argue that the fight against spam has been a losing proposition of late. At the end of last year, mail administrators noticed a big spike in the amount of spam flooding their in-boxes. Between July 1 and the end of the year, spam jumped to nearly 60 percent of all e-mail traffic monitored by Symantec Corp., and many administrators say it makes up an even greater percentage of e-mail now.
Spam filtering is not the answer, said Garth Bruen, who runs a volunteer project focused on taking down the Web sites run by spammers. Bruen tracks down the ISPs and domain name registrars used by spammers and arranges to have their sites shut down.
"This problem is not going to go away if you ignore it. Blocking and filtering is just a jacked-up technological form of ignoring," he said. "What you want to do is report it and make it difficult for these people to exist on the Net and do their transactions."
Bruen's site, http://www.knujon.com/ is where you can sign up to help or send in your spam so they can kill another spam site. Project Knujon (No junk backwards) has eliminated more than 30,000 of the spammers' websites so far. The other player that has recently gotten into the same mode of operation is Computer Cops LLC, which runs the PIRT (Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination) program. They are now actively trying to kill the spammer's websites.
Sounds like a good thing to me. The experts say that there are actually only about 50 people doing the vast majority of spamming. Believe it or not.
Doesn’t seem like a new idea, although I am not familiar with this particular group.
I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Really – I did not expect this kind of Spanish Inquisition!
WHOOOOOOOOOSH!!!
“Noooooooobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise…….”
I don’t see that it’s particularly effective, either.
I figured it was worth a shot, signed up, installed the Thunderbird plugin, and forwarded them 2-3 weeks worth of spam as it arrived. I also used a ‘dumb’ (non-rendering) browser to check up on sites mentioned in the spam bodies. As far as I could tell, there was zero effect on the sites promoted in the spam – checking back on them as the weeks wore on still showed the spammer sites at the URLs provided.
It seems like a nice idea – I’m sure it makes a lot of people feel like they’re doing something about spam – but barely any actual effective implementation that I saw. I uninstalled the plugin and haven’t been back.