Is the fight against spam horribly misguided?
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For years, spam haters have relied on junk-mail filters and Internet blacklists, but lately, some are saying it's time for
a change in tactics.
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Their answer: follow the money. And that means going after the Web sites where spammers sell their pharmaceuticals and watches
and male enhancement products.
Misguided or not, it's pretty easy to argue that the fight against spam has been a losing proposition of late. At the end of last year, mail administrators noticed a big spike in the amount of spam flooding their in-boxes. Between July 1 and the end of the year, spam jumped to nearly 60% of all e-mail traffic monitored
by Symantec, and many administrators say it makes up an even greater percentage of e-mail now.
Spam filtering is not the answer, said Garth Bruen, who runs a volunteer project focused on taking down the Web sites run
by spammers. Bruen tracks down the ISPs and domain name registrars used by spammers and arranges to have their sites shut
down.
"This problem is not going to go away if you ignore it. Blocking and filtering is just a jacked-up technological form of ignoring,"
he said. "What you want to do is report it and make it difficult for these people to exist on the Net and do their transactions."
Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, endorsed Bruen's position, saying that antispam
fighters could really hurt the spammers' bottom lines by targeting their Web sites.
"If there was more diligence in taking down the Web sites, that would have an effect on overall spam," said Chris Fleizach,
a research assistant at UC San Diego.
Bruen says current approaches to spam fighting evolved out of a different era -- before spam was widely used for online fraud
or delivering malicious software. "When this problem started out, people were annoyed, and a lot of the junk mail at that
time was urban legends and chain letters and stuff that wasn't as much of a threat as it is now," he said.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
