After Blue Security found itself under attack from spammers, it redirected its blog and corporate website to its old blog, which was hosted on Typepad. The attackers shadowed Blue Security, knocking Typepad off the air for 12 hours. While Blue Security claimed the whole thing was the fault of spammers, a mashup of the evidence provided by Blue Security and Typepad powerfully suggests otherwise. What would you do under similar circumstances?
Newsbytes
AOL dons eyepatch and 3-corner hat
Email-borne viruses down, while dumb IT bosses unleash mobiles
The new Exchange Intelligent Message Filter guide is on the streets
How long till VC hook-up with virus writers?
Why a gang of rootkit spammers named itself MOOP
In its "Gunfight at the OK Corral" with a spammer, controversial Blue Frog maker, Blue Security, was shot out of the saddle, completely losing its own website to a denial of service attack. In addition, Blue Frog client email addresses were reportedly exposed, and 10 million non-combatants in Typepad's blogging community assumed room temperature for at least twelve hours. So what did Blue Frog mean when it assured skeptical experts that there would be no innocent victims?
When Yahoo first introduced DomainKeys, its concept for a cryptographic email authentication method, AOL greeted the proposal warmly, along with other industry giants, including: Cisco, EarthLink, IBM, Microsoft, PGP Corporation, Sendmail and VeriSign. Since then, AOL has come up with other, more profitable, ideas for handling spam. Now instead of fighting commercial emailers, AOL's courting them. As for its DomainKeys excitement? Not so much.
After years of struggling to contain a growing plague of spam and its antecedents, like phishing and 419 scams, AOL and Yahoo have fallen back to the Bill Gates playbook: Charge for it. In all fairness, Gates stole the idea from the US Post Office, which profitably elevated advertising missives from "junkmail" to "Standard Mail A." It's simply a matter of perspective.
A check of six major Internet Domain Registrars accredited by ICANN turned up one registrar that actually tucks a "per spam" charge into its Terms of Service. If your domain is associated with a spammer, get your wallet out. Email Battles takes you through normal contract language, then shows you what's way out of line. Aside from this single registrar, we have found only one business this nervy... And you can bet Qwest is paying the price.
Recent Comments