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gmane.mail.exim.spamassassin |
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<[email protected]> |
The idea isn't to DOS -- the idea, is to have a clickthrough for every
recipient.
Mr.Spammer sends out 5,000,000 emails. 5,000,000 x 1k isn't much
bandwidth. He only needs 5 people to buy his wares to turn a profit on
the mailing – and he doesn't expect more than 200 people or so to click
through to his website.
His website though, if you visit and click around, is over 200k with
images and html. Every 2,500 visits to that site will cost him as
much as emailing 5,000,000.
10,000 people using a plugin in their email app that downloads the
contents of a spammers website drives his costs up 500%.
Its not a DOS attack. Its not illegal. It is a simple response to an
advertising callout. "Buy my stuff: click here for info". A plugin
automatically clicks the links for you and saves them to disk.
If 100,000 people used the plugin then, possibly, it could have the
same effect as a DDOS -- but technically, and legally, it wouldn't be,
On Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 03:21 PM, Tony Earnshaw wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
>
>>>> anyone have info on the machines that spammers host their
>>>> shoppingcarts on though?
>>>
>>> Let me guess :o) You want to become a spammer and want to set up a
>>> shopping cart site. You want info from us all over the hardware on
>>> which to set that up.
>> Totally. I want to spam you, your mom, and your mother's religion.
>
> I use SpamAssassin. My mother's been dead for many years.
>
>> If spammers are mailing their shit from hacked machines, it makes me
>> think that *possibly* they are hosting their shopping cart sites on
>> hacked machines too.
>
> Point is, that those machines are not hacked. Or very few of them.
> They don't have to be. Those machines have been configured by people
> (sysadmins, ordinary people who bought a machine at the computer
> store, you name it) who have no idea. There are millions of such
> machines on the Internet. They are badly configured MTAs, http proxies
> (Windows of all kinds, Apache), socks5 proxies and even other server
> types.
>
>> If that is a high probability, I don't want to up the bandwidth of
>> people too dumb to configure a server securely. If most spammers
>> sell their wares off of their own websites though -- I have no
>> problems with the idea of upping their bandwidth bills.
>
> They're fly-by-nights, most of them at any rate. Today they are one
> place, tomorrow another. If a new on comes in their place, who cares?
> You do an (illegal) DoS attack on one site one day, tomorrow it's
> someone else's property and legal. And how would you mount a DoS
> attack anyway, technically?
>
>> Their business model depends on low overhead. They count on nearly
>> every person they spam trashing the message. But what if every
>> person they spammed visited their website? Multiple times?
>> Bandwidth is cheap
>
> You have to be be joking. Though it's possible -
> www.ilovetheirakiminiinformationminister.com was forced to its knees
> for a few days, through everybody visiting it. Not any more though.
> Ganging up on some temporary Viagra or penis growth site isn't going
> to work. Unless you invent some new trojan to bomb them with. Odds are
> I'll be reading about you in SANS or somewhere, if you try, though.
>
> Tony
>
> --
> Tony Earnshaw
>
> Looking backwards is always easy with hindsight
>
> http://www.billy.demon.nl
> Mail: [email protected]
>