Justin Shore wrote today on CircleID about the escalating fight between spammers and spam-blockers - which the spammers seem to be winning.
Shore's essay was triggered by an announcement earlier this week that a long-time spam-fighter, Ron Guilmette, is shutting down his DNS-list of IP addresses from which spam has originated, because of "Distributed Denial of Service" attacks launched by spammers against his server. In his announcement to the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup, Guilmette said that he "rode out the first massive DDoS against my site, which lasted for 10 days...but over the past three days I have been massively DDoS'd again, and I think that the handwriting is now on the wall. I will simply not be allowed to continue fighting spam... I always knew that spammers had no principals and no ethics, but up until recently, I had no idea that they could or would...engage in quite this level of criminality. I guess that, naively, I just never thought hard enough about how much money was actually at stake (in the spamming trade) or what that might mean in terms or the determination of spammers to win at all costs. I don't know what else I can or should say at this point, other than that it is my fervent hope that people of good will and good intentions, people who believe in common values like civility, honesty, decency, and privacy, will someday be able to take back the net from the criminals who are clearly in the driver's seat at the moment...."
Guilmette is only the latest victim in a series of DDoS attacks and capitulations, according to a revealing article by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe. But Justin Shore gets the last word: "It's truly a sad day for spam fighters everywhere... how does one go about attracting the attention of law enforcement when your network is under attack? ...Legal remedies take too long and are cost prohibitive (unless you're the [Department of Justice]). Subpoenas and civil lawsuits take months if not years. Relief is needed in days if not hours."