New Spam DDOS tool

I found a new tool called SpamFryer on p2pnews today. It follows the same plan of attack as the Make Love Not Spam campaign that flopped. What makes this program different however (this is all from the story i haven't ran it yet, i will as soon as i install javavm) is that it allows user specified input. So the first thing that sprang to my mind is that as useful as it is to have this tool to attack spammers, couldn't it also be used quite easily in fact, to target other innocent bystanders. True you would need a group of people with similar intentions, but sometimes that isn't as hard as you think. Since the user can specify the target, and the amount of traffic to send, it can easily be tailored to whatever purpose the user desires...it is also open source, so it can be re-engineered to perform other tasks. I'm not particularly worried about this, i just found it to have potential for misuse. Here is the story from p2pnet: http://p2pnet.net/story/3258 and a direct link for download: http://www.plaza1.net/SpamFryer.jar

I'm going to give it a whirl in a little bit, and i'll post some more details

Spam the spammers. What a great idea.

Until you realize that all your spam mail is sent through relays that don't exist anymore using false reply addresses which aren't listening.

So you get to send your "counterspam" mail through another 5 servers before somebody realizes it's not going anywhere. Then they send you a bounce message. Or they send whatever fake email address you gave a bounce message. That's now three mails being sent for just the one original spam mail. You have now tripled the bandwidth allocated to spam, and worse than that, you never even affected the spammer.

We already waste half the bandwidth the world has on spam mail (or is it half the mail that's sent... can't remember which), You want to up that to like, 80%?

What if somebody sent out spam with your address in the reply field? Now you're getting a thousand "counterspam" messages a day and you never did anything. So you stop listening. Now those mails don't effect you anymore, but bandwidth is still being wasted on them. Much like what spammers enjoy now.

Funny, though. I never give out my email address online and guess what? I don't get spam. Not *ONE* spam mail in the over three years I've been using the account I have right now. And besides what they throw in the community paper, I don't get junk snail mail, either. Nothing with my name on it. That's because I don't give out my address to Air Miles and/or other club cards, which do the same thing as most Internet registrations. They collect an address, associate it with a product / range of products, then deliver target marketing based on it. Nobody's calling Air Miles Satan spawn for it.

Would you send a letter back for every junk snail mail you got? I bet you wouldn't. Probably because you'd have to pay for a stamp for every letter. Much like you're making a whole heapload of other people pay for your "counterspam". What these people are proposing is no better. A lot of people just feel the need to jump on the bandwagon.

Seriously, spam isn't going to stop any sooner than the three pounds of catalogues and flyers I get for every pound of newspapers and bills. It is now a fact of life. Find a better way to stop it, or get used to it.

Well said Striek

For those that are receiving spam, do not acknowledge its receipt by, responding with KMA notes, etc., just delete the crap. If you do respond, you have just told them that there is a live host on the other end, and the spam flood gates might be opened even further.

cheers

Hi Striek:

Quote:

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Funny, though. I never give out my email address online and guess what? I don't get spam.

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Wanna buy some Get It Up Stuff..................
Need a bigger Wang.................
Would you be interested in helping me to release my late fathers bullion account.........


Ha................. the Spammers are EVERYWHERE...........

You're quite correct about its capacity for misuse, which is why Lycos took down their site for Make Love Not Spam. The spammers started resolving their DNS as a CNAME for www.lycos.com. ;)
They may be annoying, but they are quick.

In general, be weary of this sort of software (esp. if you got it over P2P), there are trojans circulating that masquerade as the MLNS screensaver from Lycos. I'd be weary of anything that claims to be similar.

I did get one junk email about a month ago when the Nigerian Bank Scan did its last round. Other than that, my school sends me a message or two a week, but that gets automatically deleted and never forwarded to my ISP account, so I never see it.

For online registrations, I use MailExpire. They create a temporary email address for you which ceases to exist when you specify. It is forwarded to the account you specify. When the tempporary account ceases to exist, poof! no more spam from whoever you gave that address to. Fortunately, mailexpire doesn't sell addresses.

Trust me, it works.