Bad Guys In Control In Spam Wars

David Krebs in his Security Fix column reports that Blue Security is giving up the ghost and shutting down. Blue Security is the company who came up with a fight fire with fire approach in the spam wars led to a huge counterattack from the spammers that among other things led to the recent Six Apart crash. Some were skeptical about Blue Security's methods to begin with (they bombarded the spammers with spam asking them to stop) and feared retribution and some collateral damage (which happened.) The FBI is also reporting that they are receiving increasing numbers of online extortion complaints.

I find the entire episode, inlcuding Blue Security's surrender, fascinating and disturbing. Basically there is a an unspoken understanding out there that the bad guys rule and nothing can be done to stop them. WWW stands more for Wild Wild West than Word-Wide Web.