Vigilante justice
I don't understand why spam is still commercially viable. Looking at what I have for spammail today, I have several sTr0nG bUy recommendations for the Equal Gold Trading company, similar touting for Goldmark industries, a diet product called Anatrim from a company named unafento, spam service called Zenith-net and several thinly veiled Viagra ads from a place called iorrestuly (which doesn't resolve to anything in a browser).
So at some point, these are "real" companies, right? Someone is paying the spammers money to drive people somewhere. I assume that these are not people who get their kicks out of misspelling words and vaguely annoying everyone.
So why don't vigilante's blow the "real" companies out of the water? If you can be sure that the advertising business is actually paying for the spam (and not being set up), then surely there are people out there who can make their servers go away for awhile?
In the medium-term view, vigilanteism is the most likely method for successful spam pushback. If the rewards were huge DOS (Denial of Service) attacks, then companies would think twice about seeing spam as an alternative form of advertising.
Now phishing is another problem...
Posted on July 30, 2006
