Blue Security used to wage war against spammers by engaging in denial-of-service attacks on the spammers. However, when they were hit with a DoS attack by spammers earlier this month they redirected the attack on their blog which brought down the entire Six Apart blog service. Because of this they appear to be throwing in the towel in the fight against spam according to TechWeb.
Blue Security, which debuted its spam-fighting service last summerand built up a user base of more than 500,000, decided to wave the white flag after its servers were knocked offline by an aggressive denial-of-service (DoS) attack it claimed was launched by a deep-pocket Russian spammer tagged as "PharmaMaster."
May 3, in an attempt to get out the word about the DoS, Blue Security repointed its domain to an unused blog on Six Apart's TypePad blogging service. Within minutes, PharmaMaster attacked the blog with another DoS, which brought down Six Apart and left millions without access to their blogs. Blue Security's domain name service provider, Tucows, was also hit with a DoS and knocked offline for several hours; Tucows going down took thousands of Web sites it hosts with it.
Wednesday, Blue Security said it had to give up because it couldn't sustain the fight against spammers. "Several leading spammers viewed [us] as a strategic threat to their spam business," Eran Reshef, Blue Security chief executive wrote in the message posted to the company's site.
"After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations.
The spam war is a serious one and unfortunately many sites and services get caught in the crossfire. The fault lies not with Blue Security -- which offered an aggressive but novel plan of attack -- but with the spammers themselves.
