I think that we have to be realistic about the cost/benefit issue here.
Yes it is possible for a spammer to hire people to sign up for these
schemes. However to do so requires capital which has an effect on the
starting out spam senders.
A spam sender that tries to do this in bulk is going to start to hit limits
on the number of addresses a given IP address can sign up for at a time.
It strikes me that it might be a good scheme to allow the spam senders to
register large numbers of domains but mark them as being suspect spamhaus
addresses. Then monitor the emails being sent out with spam filters and chop
the account.
Phill
-----Original Message-----
From: Vernon Schryver [mailto:vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com]
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2003 12:58 PM
To: asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: [Asrg] News Article - Microsoft and spam
From: Yakov Shafranovich <research(_at_)solidmatrix(_dot_)com>
...
I was wondering about that as well. Would hiring people for
go through the
human interface test increases the costs for spammers? Does
it matter since
the cost is so small anyway? What about in a C/R system
where a human
interface test is used, would spammers actually go ahead
and hire people to
pass the test from each bounced message?
Let's do some arithmetic. At $10/hour and 10 seconds per challenge
answered or account created, the cost would be about $0.03 address.
That sounds a little but not very high to send mail until the
challenge whitelist entry is deleted by the spam target. It sounds
low for a valid sender account that can be used for millions of
messages for days until the free provider notices enough bounces
or receives a complaint and terminates it.
Free providers often impose delays of more than 10 seconds for
account creation. That can be handled by giving your $10/hour
employees big monitors and have them run several windows
simultaneously
to overlap with the delays. Pay them by the account created or
challenge answered to keep them busy. Use software to automate
most of the process, including counting and checking the work.
Don't worry about the U.S. labor laws about piece work, since
you're probably breaking lots of other laws.
I wonder how much of the flood of "work at home" spam today involves
free mail account creation jobs?
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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