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MyDoom the spammers

Use a variant of MyDoom to DoS the Advertisers
 
(+1, -1)
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MyDoom has been shown to be effective at shutting down a web site width a Denial of Service attack. I would like to see a variant that looks up a list of spammers and kicks off the MyDoom Zombies to shut the advertisers web sites down.

I am suggesting hitting the advertised web sites, not the spammers mail server - since we know the spammers move fast, and they also use unsuspecting peoples unprotecetd mail servers.

Of course, you would need to remove the undesirable payloads (like the back-door), but I would happily donate my PC to be a Zombie dedicated to annoying the Spam advertisers.

This does not directly impact the spammers, but who would give them business in the future if you knew that by using a spammer to advertise you were inviting a DoS attack on your own web site?

paulhem, Feb 04 2004

Distributed spam responder http://www.halfbake..._20spam_20responder
IvanIdea's non-viral version. [st3f, Oct 04 2004]

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       Can't back this. Two wrongs and all that. Despite my respect of the opinion of the honourable member from Queensland, I must dissent.   

       Your first statement is not exactly accurate. Mydoom was effective perhaps at convincing a company (in this case, sco.com) to shut down their site for a while rather than fight the DOS attack. I don't believe you can attribute credit to the virus completely.   

       You can be sure microsoft.com will not succumb as easily in the coming days.
waugsqueke, Feb 04 2004
  

       //I am suggesting hitting the advertised web sites, not the spammers mail server // -- Excellent idea, is there a way to do the same for pop-ups? Is there any little piece of code around where I (not a Java literate Internet user) can enter a website from a pop-up and it keeps accessing that web site until the owner shuts it down? I know, bad kids could abuse it, but I would love it.   

       For my grandmother (if I still had one) I would envision a button that you click to "arm" the "weapon". First click the button on the task bar then click the pop up. The rest is automatic.
kbecker, Feb 04 2004
  

       Great ideas! Lets turn the net into a complete vigilante system. Lets flood the net with even more useless traffic. :-/ It wont help. We need a different solution.
excaliber, Feb 05 2004
  

       I'm not clear if you're suggesting that my bandwidth should be given over to a (probably illegal) DDoS attack *with* my consent, or without it; either way, I'm against the idea.

//Give 'em hell!// Yes, but not by flooding the poor old Internet with yet more traffic.
English Bob, Feb 05 2004
  

       I think the virus should seek out those people who actually BUY the crap that is spammed then worm them.   

       If nobody BOUGHT spammed products then the purpose/driver for spamming would go away.   

       Don't fix the symptom, fix the disease - people who are so dumb they not only read junk mail but BUY from it.
timbeau, Feb 05 2004
  

       Too true, [timbeau] - with the volume they send out, they only need a small response rate - less than 1% in some cases - to remain profitable.
Detly, Feb 05 2004
  

       Trust me, you'll NEVER get rid of all the idiots.   

       That's why they came up with the saying, "We created the perfect idiot-proof product, and then along came bigger idiots!"   

       You don't stop robberies by telling people to stay away from a certain street or city, you stop it by flooding that street or city with police, tracking down the scumbags perpetrating the crime, and removing them from society.   

       In much the same way, we'll never be able to convince everyone to stop responding to spam. If people still drink themselves to death, or do drugs until they keel over dead, what with all the oh-so-obvious danger signs of these activities, do you really think we stand a chance of stopping people from doing something as seemingly innocuous as buying from spam?   

       The only way to stop spam is to attack its source... the spammers. Break their business model, make it unprofitable for them.   

       Just as protesters in the U.S. have made it not only unprofitable but unethical to sell or wear fur coats by protesting in front of furriers and by attacking those who sell and wear fur by throwing paint at their fur coats, we can make it unprofitable and unethical to spam in the minds of everyone.   

       Right now, it most obviously is NOT unprofitable OR unethical in the minds of a vast majority of business owners. Their greed overcomes their ethics. Hell, my own boss is trying to pressure me to start up a spamming campaign! I had to sit him down and explain to him that it was now a crime, and he could lose his internet connectivity, his email accounts, his computers, his credibility, his freedom (by going to jail), his money (by being fined by the courts), and his business (because this business relies upon the computers to do what we do... without them, we're dead in the water). But all he can see are these stupid late-night TV advertisements saying that you can do 'web marketing' and make a fortune. He assumes that this is via spam email.   

       I've got a copy of TFN2K, and I'm looking for extremely knowledgable C programmers to help me give it a GUI and limit it so it can't be used to do a DOS.   

       I want to use it to gently increase the spammers' hosting costs such that spamming is no longer profitable.   

       It'll use spoofed packets so the people using it can't be traced by the spammers and attacked. But, each person could only do a very small amount of damage to a website (only 54MB of data per day). So, if someone is disgruntled against a legitimate website, they can't do it any harm.   

       But, for the spammers (who send out spam to millions of people, hopefully thousands of which will be running this software), they'll take a large hit from all over the world.
hillscap, Apr 02 2004
  


 

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