That's not a bad thing. Right now there are a significant number of
spammers who work in the very dark gray area of abusing open relays,
open proxies, and insecure web-mail systems. Making those tools
worthless will drive the slimeballs using them off to mechanisms like
full system compromise which cannot be argued by anyone sane to be
anything less than criminal: the spammer cannot argue to his provider
or law enforcement that a crackable system was intentionally left
that way so he could crack it, as some now argue successfully in
regards to open proxies and open relays.
That's a good point, but I would not be too optimistic about the
possibility of going after them through the legal system, for several
reasons. One is the difficulty of tracking them down - it may not
be worth the effort unless we are talking about a massive network
of tens of thousands of machines. Another problem is one of
jurisdiction. Say for example that someone in Russia logs on a
system in Moldavia, hacks into a system in Australia, and uses that
system to send spam to the US. Now, where did the crime take
place, and which court would have jurisdiction in this case? I
don't know, but then again, I'm not a lawyer - however, I can well
imagine some legal problems if a situation like this arises.
--
Fridrik Skulason Frisk Software International phone: +354-540-7400
Author of F-PROT E-mail: frisk(_at_)f-prot(_dot_)com fax:
+354-540-7401
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