September 2007 Archives

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, it was fairly common practice to send out messages saying I'll link to you if you'll link to me. The messages were irritating then but perhaps they were excusable, given that everyone was still learning and most of the sites involved were the equivalent of today's Myspace pages.

One of the targets of a number of recent Storm Worm DDoS attacks has been the excellent anti-scam site CastleCops. The attackers, apparently frustrated by not being able to knock the site offline by brute force, switched tactics recently and launched a reputation-based attack on CastleCops. Using stolen PayPal accounts, they donated thousands of dollars of other people's money to CastleCops in an apparent attempt to damage their reputation and cause them problems with PayPal or law enforcement.

We've had a report that the popular scambaiting site 419Eater and the anti-scam site Scamwarners are the latest anti-spam sites to fall victim to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Both sites are down at this time. Details are hard to come by, but there's apparently been speculation that the attack originated from a Russian spamgang.