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back to article DDoS attacks fall as crackers turn to spam

Denial of service attacks are falling out of favour with black hat hackers because using compromised machines to send spam is a more lucrative - and less risky - way of making money illicitly. Networks of compromised PCs can be used for purposes including relaying junk mail or flooding targeted websites with spurious traffic …

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  1. Morely Dotes

    The Rules are the laws of nature

    As always, the trend is for criminals to engage in criminal activities. This should surprise no one.

    See http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html for an explication of The Rules.

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  2. Phil

    Is it really that difficult?

    I've been thinking about a way to curb spam once and for all, surely it could be this easy:

    Residential ISP's should simply block clients from connecting to any address on port 25, except their own SMTP server.

    Instantly stopping any botnet from being able to send out.

    Guys?

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  3. Martin Lee

    Not quite, Phil

    It wouldn't be hard at all to write a webscraper that can connect via port 80 to hotmail, gmail, yahoo or any number of free online webmail services, not to mention WebDAV connecting to Hotmail.

    Microsoft did have plans to charge a nominal fee to connect to Hotmail using WebDAV (how Outlook connects to Hotmail) but AFAIK they never actually did it.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RE: Is it really that difficult?

    Problem with blocking port 25 (some ISP's do that) is noone on your network can use other email services. In the case of 3rd party dedicated email, anti spam and antiviral services it breaks them. Everyone's locked into using ISP smtp servers which tend to die just when you really really need to send that email.

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  5. Joshua

    AutoShun.com

    We've been tracking these bots and spammers that are all interested in getting Americans to buy illegal or false pharma products for almost 10 years.

    AutoShun is our patent-pending blacklisting technology designed specifically to target and eliminate these guys from firewalls traffic.

    Check it out, it's free for those who want it. There is a subscription for those who want it delivered right to their firewall...

    www.autoshun.com

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  6. Matthew Anderson

    Why does it always have to be complicated?

    No, it is far more simple than that.... In 2005 we had some widespread vulns which were easy to exploit. The lack of such easy ones now = less teenagers with zero morals in control of large bot nets, = less ddos attacks. Simple......

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  7. Matthew Anderson

    Why does it always have to be complicated?

    No, it is far more simple than that.... In 2005 we had some widespread vulns which were easy to exploit. The lack of such easy ones now = less teenagers with zero morals in control of large bot nets, = less ddos attacks. Simple......

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