As always, the trend is for criminals to engage in criminal activities. This should surprise no one.

See http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html for an explication of The Rules.

I've been thinking about a way to curb spam once and for all, surely it could be this easy:

Residential ISP's should simply block clients from connecting to any address on port 25, except their own SMTP server.

Instantly stopping any botnet from being able to send out.

Guys?

It wouldn't be hard at all to write a webscraper that can connect via port 80 to hotmail, gmail, yahoo or any number of free online webmail services, not to mention WebDAV connecting to Hotmail.

Microsoft did have plans to charge a nominal fee to connect to Hotmail using WebDAV (how Outlook connects to Hotmail) but AFAIK they never actually did it.

Problem with blocking port 25 (some ISP's do that) is noone on your network can use other email services. In the case of 3rd party dedicated email, anti spam and antiviral services it breaks them. Everyone's locked into using ISP smtp servers which tend to die just when you really really need to send that email.

We've been tracking these bots and spammers that are all interested in getting Americans to buy illegal or false pharma products for almost 10 years.

AutoShun is our patent-pending blacklisting technology designed specifically to target and eliminate these guys from firewalls traffic.

Check it out, it's free for those who want it. There is a subscription for those who want it delivered right to their firewall...

www.autoshun.com

No, it is far more simple than that.... In 2005 we had some widespread vulns which were easy to exploit. The lack of such easy ones now = less teenagers with zero morals in control of large bot nets, = less ddos attacks. Simple......

No, it is far more simple than that.... In 2005 we had some widespread vulns which were easy to exploit. The lack of such easy ones now = less teenagers with zero morals in control of large bot nets, = less ddos attacks. Simple......