22nd July 2005: The Blue Frog and My Battle Against Spam
My home page has been many things. I think it started life as my Zetnet home page way back in 1994. Since then many years have gone by and my home page has changed many times. And before you ask - yes, of course it has been the Google search engine at some point. Its now settled (for the time being at least) on BTYahoo's customizable home page. This is a side effect of being a BT Broadband subscriber - an admittedly strange choice considering some of the past dealings I'd had with BT. However, in all honesty the broadband service has been good.
The BTYahoo home page is really very useful and has allowed me to add content to suit my whim. So each day I am able to read the news whilst I have my first coffee, check the dollar against the pound whilst enjoying bran flakes and review the weather in my hometown, my mother in law's hometown and New York whilst enjoying lunch.
So a few days ago I was checking my BTYahoo start page and I came across the following article. It interested me because in the past while I've had to abandon 2 E-mail accounts due to unmanageable levels of spam.
The article is about a controversial anti-spam system known as Blue Frog. A Blue Frog, apparently, is an animal which is so poisonous that it has no predators. This provides a clue to the nature of the Blue Frog anti-spam system and how it works on the principle of "you mess with us we mess with you" because, in a nutshell, that’s what its all about. Spammers who send unsolicited E-mails to individuals or companies protected by this system find themselves swamped with responses from the protected computers. This has the potential for gumming up a spammer's web domain altogether and dramatically interfering with their ability to do business. And this is something that any web based business cannot afford to have happen. The controversial part of this system is the response to the spam, which many have likened to a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, or DDOS.
So on to my smug sense of satisfaction. Well, maybe I am too smug at the best of times but what makes me smug about this is the fact that, for the past few years, I've unwittingly implemented a similar system myself on the PCs in our office network. Here's how it works.
In our office we use a free utility called Spam Pal to filter E-mail based on different rules ranging from known spammer phrases (mortgage, lottery, etc.) and the ip addresses known or suspected to be used by spammers. The E-mails suspected of being spam are automatically responded to with a polite and apologetic message from RWF Talking Software that the message could not be delivered because it has been suspected of being spam.
I can see where my system and the Blue Frog system differ. With Blue Frog the spammers are hit by countless E-mails when they start a spam campaign. With my system the spammers receive a confirmation that the address they sent spam to actually is a valid E-mail address. It might even encourage more spam, now that I think of it. But if everybody implemented a system like ours then perhaps it would hit the spammers where it hurt? But then again, if everybody did this it would again be a pseudo Denial of Service Attack. So that’s why I decided that its worth checking out and trying the Blue Frog system. But I have a feeling I better hurry because it seems the bad guys are fighting back. Strange how the liberties of some people are protected more than others isn't it? This article is Copyright Richard W. Fairbairn July 2005 and must not be reproduced without prior permission from the author. Please Take our Survey
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