Thinking ahead of the spammers

The Inquirer

 

The key here is that filtering does not (and never can) stop spam from being sent in the first place. It is only a short-to-medium term measure with the proper solution requiring the destruction of spammers' business models (see the New Spam Retaliation Tool thread for more information on this).

The pump'n'dump highlighted in the article is self-limiting in that there are only a very few people genuinely stupid enough to believe them and they don't keep their money for long. The bigger problem is with other "smart" investors thinking they can outsmart the spammers and make a quick buck by buying in and getting out fast - however the effects of the pump seem to be getting smaller and once the "smarts" realise this, then they will avoid such stocks like the plague.

The reality is though, that pump'n'dump is more a sign of weakness for the spammers. The risk is greater and the profitability almost certainly less compared to mortgage referral spam (which at one point was apparently worth $50 or so per mug lead) or pharmaceuticals. One major spammer has already complained about this.

 

The first sentence says it all- Some 80 percent of spam originates from botnets.
And these botnets could comprise of god knows how many ordinary computers, their users still in the dark about the real situation. It's not surprising if anyone stumbles upon any security forum with tons of distress calls from users whose computers are infected. You just cannot imagine the situation.

 

These are the keys to stop spam:
-Strong laws
-Destruction of spammers' business model(see Paranoid2000´s post)
-Destruction of spammers' delivery model aka fight botets

 

Now we go directly for the bad guys themselves.
-Strong laws. How about some providers' anti-spam policies and do they help?
-Destroy them. Nice move. War.

 

-I don´t know much about this. In my country, antispam legislation is almost non existent.
-Fighting botnets means cleaning end-users PCs and educating them. What would be of spammers without distributed computing?

 

-Singapore has no anti-spam legislation too. Most countries don't have such laws. I think there was something about this in the US?
- You are right. If everybody was well-educated enough and had their PCs secured tighter than a Supermax prison, how good that would be. Same meaning as boycotting a company and its products. Without any computers available for exploit, the spammers and malware creators would be out of business. Now, if only that could come true...

 

I am surprised that Singapore, being a first world country and having a high immersion in technology, lacks antispam laws. Surely it´s a political matter.

 

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=154330

 

interesting