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Antispam 'blacklist' providers hit by online attacks
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September 26, 2003 (Computerworld) -- After fighting unsolicited commercial e-mail for several years by compiling and distributing Internet "blacklists" used by Internet service providers to block e-mail from known spammers, two online businesses have given up their efforts after their Web sites were crippled by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks they believe were launched by spammers.
And another company has ended its blacklist participation due to fears of potential attacks from spammers apparently going on the offensive against antispam activists.
Ron Guilmette, a Roseville, Calif.-based proprietor of a small, independent software company, Monkeys.com, and Joe Jared, owner of Osirusoft.com, a foot orthopedics design business in Orange, Calif., shut down their antispam blacklists recently, declaring that spammers had forced them to do so with DDoS and other attacks.
The third blacklist provider, Compu-Net Enterprises in Paris, Tenn., also ended public distribution of its blacklist because of fears that it could be the next target for an attack by spammers trying to cripple its business. Bill Larson, the network administrator at Compu-Net, said today that the preventive measure will affect some 1,500 Internet service provider servers that regularly used his company's blacklist to filter e-mail for spam.
Guilmette halted distribution of his antispam blacklist and removed a Web page filled with antispam reference materials on Sept. 22 after his site was attacked and shut down for 10 days in August and again last weekend. His e-mail address was also recently spoofed and used to send pornographic images and sex-related messages to about 1 million e-mail accounts, prompting angry responses from recipients and making his business look like a spam machine, he said.
Guilmette had ramped up antispam efforts in recent months by working with Internet service providers around the world to construct an "open proxy honeypot network" that used automated logging software to see where spammers were hijacking access on insecure servers to send out spam, he said. The honeypot, a trap that allowed service providers to collect the IP addresses of the spammers, helped get "more than 100 of the Internet's largest spammers disconnected" by their own service providers, he said.
That's why Guilmette believes spammers may have targeted him. "I came front and center to the attention of the worst of the spammers," he said.
After the last attack, he'd had enough. "I'm done fighting spam. I didn't decide this. The spammers have done this for me" by cutting off his business lifeline, he said.
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