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Reader Voices: Unpunished Spammers
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By Ed Foster, Section The Gripelog
Posted on Tue Nov 04, 2003 at 01:04:02 PM PDT
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In a recent Weblog item I printed the lament of an IT manager concerning two anti-spam sites that were forced to close by spammers’ denial-of-service attacks. He was upset that law enforcement officials had proven so unable or unwilling to act in such cases, and many readers felt the same way.
One piece of breaking news that may help get the attention of authorities is that the latest virus making the rounds, the W32/Mimail-E virus, appears to be specifically designed to produce denial-of-service attacks from infected computers on anti-spam sites such as Spamhaus.org. See the Spamhaus press release.
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Several readers were so passionate about the issue that they said I should have played the story up more. "I think this is really one of the most important stories around, and yet even you are burying it as a sub-story without even a tagline to draw interest," wrote one reader. "I am being pummeled by these spam-worms much more than I ever was by Blaster, yet the media seems to have decided we had enough news about viruses ... but surely this rates as just as important as the do-not-call list. Here we have promulgators of pornography and cons collaborating to wipe out legitimate organizations trying to prevent our children from being exposed to much worse than a telemarketer."
A number of readers said that law enforcement is only interested in protecting big corporations or the government from denial-of-service attacks. "The simple fact is that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies aren't interested unless (a) A large, deep-pockets corporation is under attack (thus ensuring Congress will get involved if the FBI won't), or (b) a terrorist attack has already happened," a reader opined. "And when the terrorists use this distributed network of zombies to attack Federal interest computers and exploit the known vulnerabilities to obtain highly classified information for purposes of physical attacks, the FBI will claim they never had any warning. Only this time, the American public will know better, because we sysadmins are the public, and we will ensure everyone else knows that the FBI is knowingly aiding and abetting terrorism by inaction."
But some think it’s time for IT professionals to take matters into their own hands. "I have heard of citizens filing private criminal suits when prosecutors failed to act, although it would surely take deep pockets," wrote one reader. "Perhaps it's time for the IT community to form its own ACLU-type foundation, an organization to take on spammers, DoS instigators, privacy issues, security, the ITAA and H-1B visas, and -- in their off hours -- Larry Ellison."
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