At 11:05 PM 6/19/2003 -0400, Barry Shein wrote:
On June 19, 2003 at 17:42 brunner(_at_)nic-naa(_dot_)net (Eric Brunner-Williams in
Portland Maine) wrote:
> Barry,
>
> I sent a similar note to the nanog two days ago, with no response.
>
> I've no idea why this is of so little interest to so many people,
> I think its actually rather cool, and getting the terminating
> condition to converge to "soon" is worth working on.
There are two major causes of spam at this point in time:
1. Lawlessness and lack of enforcement of existing laws.
I'll admit that I'd sympathize with anyone in law enforcement saddled
with this problem; where does one start?
Well, first of all, where we have caught and investigated spammers
like Carmack and Ralsky it shouldn't be that hard to take logs of spam
they sent and show that they illegally used others' computers to send
it (assuming they did.) Either they had rights to the IPs it spewed
from, or they didn't. That should be a chargeable offense.
Second, I'd honeypot them with the SWAT teams ready to go. They scan
for these infected hosts (or the hosts report to them when the
infection self-installs.) This can all be simulated with only modest
effort and arrests made.
But the interesting part of that is not the honeypotting, it's the
prosecution. One needs the backing of a competent prosecuting body or
else it's all just an academic exercise.
2. Microsoft operating systems which continue to be flawed and
vulnerable to viruses.
Now that viruses have emerged (Jeem, Proxy-Guzu, sobig.a) which can
make a computer (or, more to the point, millions of computers) an
unwitting weapon against the entire net this problem has to be taken
more seriously by Microsoft.
Are any of these problems solvable by technical means? Going over and over
the illegality of spam does not help things, our group cannot make any
legal impact anyway - we are working on technical solutions.
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