Re: teergrubing

Tony Earnshaw <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.mail.exim.spamassassin
Message-ID <[email protected]>
[email protected] wrote:

> 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,

"Well", he said lamely "it doesn't seem a good idea to me".

BTW it seems that Windows machines (by the hundred) are in fact getting 
trojan-hacked to send spam. In the end, it's the ISP who's going to have 
to do the combating.

Tony

-- 
Tony Earnshaw

Looking backwards is always easy with hindsight

http://www.billy.demon.nl
Mail: [email protected]
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.