RSSIBM Fights Back Against Spammers
By Ed Oswald | Published March 22, 2005, 1:43 PM
IBM upped the ante in its fight against spam by releasing FairUCE Tuesday, a technology the company claims fights junk mail better by analyzing the "domain identity" of an e-mail. If an e-mail is deemed to be spam, it is redirected back to the real sender, essentially spamming the spammer.
According to IBM, a computer would be able to differentiate an e-mail that is spoofed, such as the numerous PayPal scams circulating the Internet, from a true e-mail coming from a legitimate source.
FairUCE stands for "Fair Use of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail," a play on the term more commonly used for describing legal ways that someone can use copyrighted work.
FairUCE is IBM's first foray into spam prevention; the company previously offered e-mail filtering. This is also the first time an anti-spam service will actually send the data back to the spammer.
There is a chance that legitimate e-mails could be misidentified, but IBM says it is not worried about any liability since all the e-mails do is bounce back.
Lycos Europe in late November released a screensaver called "Make Love Not Spam" that directly targeted spam servers with denial of service attacks, but removed it after bad press. The software was also blamed for taking two legitimate Chinese Web sites offline.
Other companies, such as Microsoft and America Online have taken legal routes to deal with the spam problem, but have found limited success in suing spammers. It is unclear whether successful lawsuits have had any measurable effect on the amount of junk mail.
IBM's latest anti-spam product is just the latest in a line of various attempts over the past several months to find a way to stop what seems to be an ever increasing amount of spam traveling through the Internet. According to IBM research, nearly 8 out of every 10 e-mails sent are spam, a number that has risen sharply since the beginning of the decade.
However, Big Blue feels that its source tracking technology may be the answer, according to IBM Director Stuart McIrvine.
"By creating a multi-layered defense that proactively repels spam at its source, companies can get ahead of spammers and malicious hackers who are always looking for new ways of penetrating IT systems through email," said McIrvine.
another BIG player on the market allows you to only receive mail from people you know...bit of a problem to receive mail from new people but overall very effective...I guess people dont like to credit microsoft for this, but as far as now, this scheme seems to work pretty much...as for total protection = impossible the same as computers will ever be "hackfree"...we have to do it with the best of the worst...keep educating people instead of computers...
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One of the problems with Spam is that it takes up a large portion of internet bandwidth.... using this could effectivly double that drain on the internet. Great thinking!
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I hardly think bandwidth is a problem. If this software is designed for Email Service Providers to use then the only people suffering are the other Email Service Providers being used as Spam sources or individual computers sending this.
With current Spam Bot ideals such as "if it responds then keep on spamming" the software SHOULD respond from a random name ie: "as32fs32fsdf5tgergf@host.dom"
Personally I think Email has long past it's use by date and a new form of sending mail is needed. Creating huge networks requiring user validation and having signup systems to request correspondence with another user (whereby that user can block hosts from applying to request based on their network or country).
SMTP and POP3 are fair enough, but stop f*cking around with filtering crap parsed through such protocols. Instead, remake the protocols to include a Fair Use level of security. The only problem I can see with methods like this is that sending 'mail' would become too comercial to be practical.
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one word - one product: Choicemail
That's all you need to know. This IBM idea is not a solution, the real solution already exists.
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Hello?
Anybody there?
Spammers will LOVE THIS! They will get a reply (thanks to FairUCE) from every VALID account out there. They will then KNOW that the account is valid and will target it with spam that FairUCE isn't capable of filtering.
Yeah, it's not a 'reply', but it has your email address in it, and they will be able to validate that, bumping you to the top of their lists.
I expected better of BigBlue...really. The title of this article should be, "IBM helps spammers narrow down their lists to only REAL and ACTIVE accounts."
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Corp users may like this, spammers already know emails of a large company. Bouncing back allows legitimate senders to realized their mail didn't make it, rather then just have it vanish.
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Actually, it's not quite so stupid. Given the sheer volume of spam email that is sent from a particular location, getting all that e-mail BACK in a huge flood gives them a taste of their own medicine.
What would be MORE effective though, than simply redirecting the spam back to the originator, is autoreplying with an "Error 500" (address dead) message to fool the originating server into believing the address doesn't exist. Apple Mail and KDE's mail client both have the ability to do this manually, but it's limited because it relies on the From or Reply-To addresses, which are almost always forged.
My current solution is redirecting unsolicited commercial e-mail to the Federal Government's spam database (spam@uce.gov), letting them collect it for use in potential prosecution of spammers for violations of the CAN-SPAM act. If the reply address includes a major provider (i.e., Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail), their antispam address also gets a copy.
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