Blue Security, the anti-spam concern whose users received threatening e-mail from at least one irate Russian spammer, has thrown in the towel.
The decision ends a vicious battle between Blue Security and a spammer known as Pharma Master that resulted in collateral damage to thousands of blogs and Web sites.
“We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations,” said a statement on Blue Security's Web site. “We believe this [shutting down] is the responsible thing to do.”
Blue Security’s controversial approach to fighting spam involved subscribers signing up for a “do-not-intrude” no-e-mail registry. Blue Security’s registrants downloaded a piece of software called a Blue Frog that they would use to report spam. Blue Security would then try and contact the spammers through their Web site complaint or opt-out forms to convince them to clean their lists of Blue Security’s registrants. The idea was that enough complaints from Blue Security would cripple spammers’ operations and convince them to stop sending e-mail to its registrants.
Israel-based Blue Security claims it convinced six of the world’s top 10 spammers to scrub their lists against its registry.
However, PharmaMaster apparently used Blue Security’s list-scrubbing process and compared his old list to the new one to identify addresses of Blue Security registrants that were on his list. He then began sending Blue Security registrants on his list e-mails threatening them with a torrent of spam unless they dropped Blue Security’s service.
Do-not-e-mail registry critics have contended it was only a matter of time before such a security breach took place.
The Russian spammer also mounted what’s known as denial of service attacks aimed at flooding Blue Security’s servers with fake traffic and shutting it down. The attacks resulted in massive collateral damage, reportedly also shutting down hundreds of thousands of Web sites, mail servers and blogs.
Blue Security’s Web site was no longer accessible as of Wednesday.
