IBM Believes In Spam For A Spam Vigilante Revenge

Email

from the denial-of-service,-anyone? dept

It seems that larger companies are really getting pissed off at spammers these days. While going out and attacking spammers used to be more limited to net.vigilantes, some well known companies have been taking stronger approaches to fighting spam lately. A few months back there was Lycos’ plan to let anyone download a screensaver that would launch distributed denial of service attacks on spammers. While Lycos claimed it wouldn’t take anyone offline, it wasn’t long before that was proven false. Next up on the list is IBM, whose latest anti-spam offering will send data right back at spamming machines in an effort to slow them down. It’s not quite a distributed denial of service attack — it’s more like a centralized one. It’s sort of one step up beyond greylisting which just slows down the spam. Instead, this tries to slow down the computer sending the spam. Again, this leaves IBM open to charges of hitting back too hard — especially if innocent sites get taken offline in the process. Still, when large companies like IBM start offering products like this, you know that people are getting fed up.