Criminals Using Commercial Spamflooding Services
Cybercriminals are using commercial spamflooding services to distract their victims during key moments of a cyberattack.
Clever, but in retrospect kind of obvious.
Entries Tagged "spamflooding"
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Spammers Win One
Blue Security was an Israeli company that fought spam with spam:
Eran Reshef had an idea in the battle against spam e-mail that seemed to be working: he fought spam with spam. Today, he’ll give up the fight.
Reshef’s Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.
That led to a flood of Internet traffic so heavy that it disrupted the spammers’ ability to send e-mails to other victims—a crippling effect that caused a handful of known spammers to comply with the requests.
Then, earlier this month, a Russia-based spammer counterattacked, Reshef said. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, the spammer flooded Blue Security with so much Internet traffic that it blocked legitimate visitors from going to Bluesecurity.com, as well as to other Web sites. The spammer also sent another message: Cease operations or Blue Security customers will soon find themselves targeted with virus-filled attacks.
Last week Blue Security gave up:
Wednesday, Blue Security said it had to give up because it couldn’t sustain the fight against spammers. “Several leading spammers viewed [us] as a strategic threat to their spam business,” Eran Reshef, Blue Security chief executive wrote in the message posted to the company’s site.
“After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations.
“As much as it saddens us, we believe this is the responsible thing to do,” said Reshef, who did not respond to an e-mail requesting additional comment. Later Wednesday, a spokesman said that the company would not be making any additional statements beyond the message on its site.
Another news article. And Marcus Ranum on Blue Security’s idea.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.