[13262] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: economics of spam (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Tue May 13 14:20:42 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
To: sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us
Cc: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>,
Matt Crawford <crawdad@fnal.gov>, bear <bear@sonic.net>,
cypherpunks@lne.com, cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 11:30:31 -0400
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
In message <200305130152.h4D1qC1F007097@syn.hamachi.org>, Bill Sommerfeld write
s:
>> The other side of this equation is what a second of CPU costs in
>> monetary terms to a spammer. (To an end user it is essentially free
>> because his CPU is mostly idle anyway; the limiting factor for the
>> user is his preference for fast mail delivery (and in the dialup
>> case an unwillingness to sit waiting for tokens to be calcluated
>> before his mail can be sent).
>
>If you believe http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2988209.stm,
>spammers are beginning to use viruses to deploy spam relays.
>
>If a spammer has a zombie army of a few thousand compromised systems,
>the spammer's cpu time costs for hashcash will also essentially be
>free.
The spammers are doing that and more. For example, recent traffic on
the NANOG list suggests that they are using false BGP advertisements on
stolen address blocks to shoot and run. (There is a proposal to stop
that via cryptographic authentication of BGP advertisements, but SBGP
hasn't gotten any traction with most of the operator community yet.
Just why is a subject for a separate thread.)
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com
