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05.03.06
Blue Frog Spam War Escalates
 By
David A. Utter
A Russian spammer claimed he possesses the email addresses of everyone using Blue Security's anti-spam Blue Frog software and threatened to spam members of that list continually unless they leave Blue Security.
The Blue Security website has been running with a minimal presence recently, a condition company CEO Eran Reshef said in a TechWeb report had been caused by the extra publicity surrounding the story of the spammer's threats.
That publicity included notice on both Slashdot and Digg. The heavy tech-oriented readership of both sites can bring a website to a crawl when they hit a linked story in massive numbers. That plus attacks by Russian spammers have made some of the site's pages unavailable.
Blue Security's Blue Frog software works by catching spams that hit the inbox of a Blue Frog user. Blue Security analyzes those messages and traces them back to their senders. Then they fill out an opt-out form if available, or generate a complaint message to the spammer.
Once that has been done, every time a spam hits a Blue Frog member another opt-out or complaint is generated automatically and sent back to the source. Reshef said in the article that the Blue Frog registry numbers over 500,000 members.
Reshef also said the database of users Blue Security has is encrypted, and the spammer does not have access to that list. "Our members are not in any jeopardy of 'exposure' since the spammers already have their addresses. That is why they joined the Blue Community, to stop spam at its source," he said in the report.
The CastleCops security website summarized the attacks on Blue Security in a recent post. Those include the spammers sending out messages faked to look like they come from Blue Security, and hitting the Blue Security websites with Denial of Service attacks.
Reshef observed that the mass email threats and attacks on Blue Security indicate the Blue Frog registry and actions are working. He said in the article four major spam rings that generate eight percent of the world's spam have agreed to back off and leave members of the Blue Frog registry alone.
About the Author:
David is a staff writer for EnterpriseSecurityNews
covering cyber security.
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