Recently I installed Cloudmark's Spamnet for Outlook, which is a plug-in designed to short-circuit spammers by reporting email marked as spam to a central (or is it a distributed?) network server. The spam is then automatically ID'd and dumped by all recipients into a spam folder.

My idea is to take that cooperative design and apply it to firewalls on some sort of highly secure trust ring. If one firewall reports a malicious attack, it reports the DNS and IP of the attack's originator to other firewalls in the ring, who automatically block any attempts from that machine.

Workable?
-- RayfordSteele, Sep 03 2003

Baked - we had it at the company I used to work for. Not sure what to search for, so I don't have any good links for you.
-- Worldgineer, Sep 03 2003


I think it works by waiting for a certain number of confirmations before labeling something as spam. The spam guard that Yahoo (yes I know, *shudder*) uses seems to work quite well, I haven't had to feel inadequate about my penis size for some time now.
-- RoboBust, Sep 03 2003


The impetus for this was the nearly 30 IP scans, subseven attacks, and such that my firewall reports every day.

I suppose one could set up the system to allow a manual override for specific IP's, or configure it to net-report only more severe attacks.

Could get tricky when dealing with intranet routers, though.
-- RayfordSteele, Sep 04 2003


I had an email come in a couple of days ago that installed all sorts of adult buttons on my browser. It calls itself “surferbar”. The damn thing got through Norton and all the other no-good stuff I’ve got that’s supposed to protect me, and, well, it’s annoying as hell.

What I’d like to do for email like that is for it to be routed to a law firm set up for the specific purpose of suing the sender. Automatically bouncing the spam to the law firm would make you eligible to join in a class-action lawsuit against these horrible people.

The thing could pay for itself with an occasional settlement.
-- pluterday, Sep 04 2003


Oh, Mr. Burns, that didn't work, would you believe it? But I got rid of the pesky thing just a few minutes ago by using a rescue disk and manually picking out the nasty lice.
-- pluterday, Sep 04 2003


I would like to propose the elimination of the computer category. BORING!BORING!
-- squeak, Sep 05 2003


I forge the source IP address in my malicious attack to be www.google.com, tricking everyone in your ring into blocking all Google traffic? Lame idea.
-- riromero, Sep 05 2003



random, halfbakery