Hacking to protect others.

[Tedob1]

You check your email and find one of those scam letters confirming your order for flowers. Being a member of AO you’ve heard all about this before and know its just a way of fishing for account info, credit card info whatever. You have a list of open relay mail servers you’re about to report to black hole.

Would you go to the fake site, get the email addy the info gets sent to and mail-bomb it to keep unsuspecting moms and pops from getting ripped off. Knowing it will take a while before the mail box gets closed by the provider. Would you just report it? Both?

[Zonewalker]

if I was being sensible I'd just report it.. let the authorities deal with it in the proper way - thats what they're there for.

Having said that there are some things which I don't think should ever be allowed to be gotten away with so I'd be inclined to mail bomb them as well just to make sure...it'd very much depend on how I felt on a particular day

Question is are we talking a theoretical situation here or not??


Z

[Tedob1]

for the intentions of starting discussion here its theoretical. im not asking anyone to do this if thats what you mean...ive written my own mail-bomber and have more than enough spam to sort threw for open relays. obviously to the letter of the law its wrong, just as its wrong to beat on a man thats beating on a woman or child to stop them.

[Zonewalker]

hey tedob - I know your rep well enough to know you can write (and evidently have written) your own mail bomber - I know you're not fishing for one or asking anyone else to do it for you. I'm not one of the 'newbie' seniors - well not entirely anyway

I was just wondering how theoretical the question was.

In many respects I'm an eye for an eye kind of person..... but these days doing the 'right thing' can land you in a world of pain. To be a bastard you have to be a complete gentleman - if you get what I mean?

Z

[MrLinus]

If I can interject, there is always that nagging question of "is email address in fact the correct one"? A few months ago a call center ended up getting DoS'd because the attacker sent out a spam claiming that users were billed for a new iPod and customers were flooding the phone lines with complaints about the "charge". How would you know that the site wasn't set up for that kind of purpose?

The other thing is: how effective would mailbombing be in this day and age with high speed connections and high speed computers? (just theorectical -- I'm not interested in testing the theory).

Lastly, if they are going to spam and such to collect data, would they actually put up a legit email? Wouldn't they use the fake site (e.g., the CitiBank "phish" of late) to collect the data to a database or text file and collect that?

[Tedob1]

good point

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The subject line was an order confirmation number.

I thought, 'What the heck is this? I didn't order anything!' says Griffin, who then worried that maybe her kids did.

When she opened the e-mail, it said her America Online account had been billed $90 for an order of long-stem roses from 1-800-flowers.com. Along with a realistic itemized invoice, it provided a hyperlink button to click if this order was unauthorized.

Griffin clicked it and got a Web site purporting to be 1-800-flowers.com. But instead of proceeding, she called the company. The customer rep told her this was a scam that's going around and that most likely every e-mail contact in her AOL address book would soon get the same spam.

It's a hoax targeting AOL members that falsely claims to be sent by us. Obviously, or not, it is not sent by us or anyone on our behalf, says 1-800-flowers.com spokesman Ken Young.

According to Young, the scam tries to get AOL members' screen names and passwords at a counterfeit 1-800-flowers.com Web site. We never ask for anything like that on our site, he says, adding that 1-800-flowers.com and AOL are working together to snuff this scam.

In the past, scams like this have tried to pry loose screen names and passwords or credit card numbers for identity fraud, or even to bamboozle millions of recipients into flaming a corporate site after thinking it had sent them an incorrect invoice.

A lot of people out there scoff at these, but don't forget there are tens of thousands of people and more who come online everyday for the first time, says AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham.

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your right...i guess it IS better to bring down the whole server. Thanks! ;-)


Zonewalker:

i was reading the thread about hacking for political reasons which is dumb, no matter how you look at it. so i thought asking this question might make it more personal and lead to a good discussion. originally i posed this question in that thread but decided it was going too far off topic ...the question is totally hypothetical and i guess i shoud have thought it out better so MsM couldn't punch it full of holes