CastleCops® - Spam-blocking lists under siege: SPEWS/SpamCop

Aug. 29 — Internet gangsters with a grudge against anti-spam “block lists” used to stave off unwanted e-mail have unleashed a plague of data packets against some of the leading providers of the services. The onslaughts have intermittently blocked access to several of the spam fighters’ Internet sites in recent weeks and have succeeded in shutting down the oft-maligned SPEWS list.

THE CYBERATTACKS, which began in midsummer and have increased steadily in the intervening weeks, forced Joe Jared, who had been hosting the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, also known as SPEWS, at his Osirusoft.com Web site, to suddenly pull the plug Tuesday on the popular but controversial block list.

“I had to shut it down to protect my livelihood,” said Jared, who also runs a small business selling shoe inserts on the Web site. “I was getting hammered with up to 1,000 megabytes (of data) per second.”

Other block lists, which are used by Internet service providers and businesses to filter out the majority of incoming spam before it reaches the end users, have come under siege from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks this summer. The bombardment of massive amounts of data has intermittently prevented subscribers or users from gaining access to lists at Web sites of SpamCop.net, Spamhaus.org, Monkeys.com and the Spam & Open Relay Blocking System.

ATTACKS MORE SYSTEMATIC, INTENSE

DDOS attacks have been used against anti-spam sites before, but this summer’s onslaught appears to be more systematic and intense than anything seen before.
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• Profiles of the prolific: The Top 10 spammers

“There’s not much doubt in my mind that the various attacks are the work of the same person or organization,” said Julian Haight, president of Seattle-based SpamCop.net, which has been under attack since mid-July.

While it’s not clear who is behind the campaign, suspicion has focused on renegade spammers, who have an obvious motive.

Continued @ MSNBC


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