5 ms·
Cheap, but not free. If it means that a spammer can send 100 emails before marked as spam instead of 10,000 or 100,000, it changes the landscape for sure.
by tboyd47 6y ago
Cheap, but not free. If it means that a spammer can send 100 emails before marked as spam instead of 10,000 or 100,000, it changes the landscape for sure.
- LinuxBender 6y agoIf the spammers implement PoW, I am not seeing how the numbers change. Instead of seeing for example 1 million infected PC's and VM's sending email, you would see 1 million infected PC's and VM's doing PoW. Ill give you an example of how this played out in the past. Up until about a decade ago, if I enforced TLS on my mail servers, about 80% of the malware bots could not connect as their libraries did not support TLS. As more smtp libraries added support for TLS, the malware was updated and now enforcing TLS only limits a smalll subset of spammers. There was no added cost to the spammer. So yes for a while, PoW will create a window of time where there is less spam for those that adopt this. The spammers will eventually catch up. Nowadays malware frameworks are much easier to update.
- sumtechguy 6y agoThe diff for a spammer of 100 boxes that run their bot vs 1000 makes no difference to them. The cost is negligible. Even if you make the process slower. They can just scale out or wait it out. If it takes 1 hour vs 2 hours to do their payload there is no real difference to them. They have also already built in the filtering as a % that fails. They are looking for less than 1-2% success which is all they need. The frameworks are no longer some simple script hacked up in VBS. They are packages they can buy from other spammers or rent the bot net with the proper libs built in.