Blue Security Blues

Dave G. | May 17th, 2006 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry

Blue Security announced that it is calling it quits. They are/were an anti-spam company that would use its customer base to strike back against the spammers, by ‘attacking back’. The basic idea (as I understand it) is that they set up a ‘do-not-spam list’. Spammers who spam addresses on that list get attacked back. I guess the hope was that spammers would download that list, and remove people on it, in fear of retribution.

What happened was that they got outmaneuvered by… wait for it… nastier spam (extortion). And DoS attacks. And there is no doubt that it really sucks, when a company trying to do something to help gets clobbered.

What I don’t get is, How did they not see this attack coming? I mean, maybe not the scale of it, but it seems like they were totally unprepared for it!

Of course, the fact that this attack happened and now they are closing up shop do not have to be related. I still don’t know how they were planning on/or if they were making money.

Good entry on Blue Security (and this incident) at wikipedia.

Spam sucks.

1 Comment so far

  • Jensol

    May 18th, 2006 9:22 am

    Blue Security had to shut down, not because they couldn’t technologically get back on their feet, but because major ISPs have obviously made a point by threatening of law suits for damage and loss of revenue caused by the DDos.

    This is what lies beneath the “innocent users and collateral damage”.

    I don’t think Eran Shereff and Eran Aloni were stupid enough to start this business without knowing they were tackling really dirty players. So much for their good intentions. Their stepping down is a sad event, not because the spammers win, rather because they are showing how short sighted they have been with all this. All the players in the anti-spam industry which they approached prior to start operation told them the Blue Frog was a bad idea.

    I am sad that they had to step down, I am sad to see that the spammers will keep going as they please, but nonetheless: shame on Blue Security for letting down thousands of users who took some loss in the last two weeks.

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