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27 Nov 2009
A year ago when I was having lunch with an IT security consultant colleague, he started to voice his opinions on how hosted email filtering companies, like ours, were the main beneficiaries of the spam deluge that has hit customers in recent years.
Emboldened by a glass of wine or two, he then went on to say that if we were so concerned about people’s problems with unwanted email, why not really stop it? I started talking up our new technology that pushed spam back to the sender’s machine, and so on.
But I was stopped short with a dismissive wave of the hand. My, by now slightly slurring, friend interjected: “No! I mean stop the botnets properly.”
I thought about this, and it occurred to me that it was indeed possible if we had the co-operation of the infected to let companies know their resources were being used by a spammer botnet, and advise them to seek assistance.
We should be able to track the spam being sent to us, and thus break up the botnets to a certain degree. The chaps in the office have automated such a process and we have been playing with the result.
The problem with this is that it generates a new cost the price of advising people they had a virus infection and were therefore sending out truckloads of spam. We would like to be altruistic, but unfortunately it costs money. Charity, while fantastic for the less well off, seems somewhat stupid aimed at the corporate market.
On consulting some of our channel partners, we thought up a simple solution. If we informed a company that they had a virus that was sending spam, and they needed some assistance with the situation, we would recommend them to one of our partners. Everyone would gain.
So we are now trying to stop the botnets. The quite incredible thing is that some companies, when told they are unwilling participants in a large spam-sending zombie-based organisation, really do not care. What do you think?
Ken Bagnall is managing director at The Email Laundry
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