This post on Weblog spam is a little depressing.
Spam works and it is big business, and spammers are increasingly organized and increasingly business-savvy. It’s not some guy in the garage who bought a CD of email addresses from MicroWarehouse (yes, they used to sell them, I have old MacWarehouse catalogs to prove it) who thought it would be ‘cool’ to tell a million people about his Beanie Baby collection. It’s organized crime rings who hire programmers to automate everything they possibly can (domain registration, ISP registration, free email account registration) and hire menial workers for pennies an hour halfway around the world to do all the manual things they can’t automate (like get past image-based login systems). They hire virus writers to write extremely sophisticated viruses that exploit all known holes in everything, install spyware, malware, adware, and remote control programs with which they can both send more spam and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks… against anti-spam advocates.
What he’s saying is the days when we could have open comments on weblogs without people having to register is going to be over pretty soon. He also believes that most current antispam techniques aren’t going to work.
Weblogs may turn out to be The Next Thing for spammers, the next vector to exploit. And if that’s true, then things are going to get really ugly really quickly. If you’re up for that fight, then take them on, Godspeed. But prepare yourself for the worst, and then imagine something worse than that, and then accept that your imagination is too limited, because it will be so much worse than that.
Makes me wonder what they’re going to exploit next; I suspect they’ll start spamming UBB boards, perhaps using packet sniffing to get the passwords of legitimate users.
Nuke Florida from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
