Spammers have Archilles' heel

SPAMMERS COULD be taken out of business quickly if companies stopped wasting time trying to block mail servers used to send the unwanted email out.

Boffins at the University of California, San Diego, claim that the Archilles heel in the business method that spammers use is that they still need to advertise Web sites.

Chris Fleizach, a research assistant with UC San Diego told Network World that if there was more diligence in taking down the Web sites using spam advertising methods the technique would not be effective.

Fleizach said that while it was nearly impossible to stop spam emails being sent, 94 percent of the time the scam could be traced back to a single Web server which was hosted on a single IP address.

All that would have to be done is a network-based block either via IP blacklisting or network filtering.

Researchers looked at more than a million spam messages over a one-week period and traced them to more than 36,000 URLs.

Of course, if anyone was bothered about catching spammers they'd be easy enough to trace. But this parasitic industry makes a fortune out of spam, either by sending it, or by selling "spam-blocking software" or by selling computers to replace those that are so stuffed full of the stuff as to be useless. µ