What do the U.S. Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing-weary citizens and a poisonous amphibian have in common? They’re both sources of inspiration for Blue Security Inc.’s endeavour to annoy spammers into submission.
Menlo Park, Calif.-based Blue Security last month released its Do Not Intrude Registry program to beta. The system relies on community action and smart software to give spammers a taste of their own medicine.
At www.bluesecurity.com/register/pr, computer owners can join the Blue Community. Here they’ll download Blue Security’s Blue Frog application to run on their machines, and register their e-mail accounts for the registry. They’ll also get “honey pot” e-mail accounts designed to attract spam.
The honey pots send spam to Blue Security’s analysis centre, where the company’s human filters, alongside advanced screening technology, target spammers for retribution. In conjunction with this back-end work, the Blue Frog app on the user’s PC finds the order-entry fields on the spammer’s site and fills them with a complaint requesting that the spammer should refrain from sending messages to people in the Blue Community.
The system sends one complaint for each instance of spam its members receive. Should the program prove successful spammers would be overwhelmed with bogus orders and wouldn’t be able to process genuine orders for thier products.
Blue Security took inspiration from the Do Not Call Registry, which people in the U.S. can join if they want telemarketers to lay off. The Blue Frog app takes its name from the blue poison arrow frog, a creature whose poisonous body deters predators.
Eran Reshef, Blue Security’s CEO, said his company seeks enterprise participants for the beta as well as consumers. He invited businesses to contact his firm for more information (www.bluesecurity.com).
He said it’s not fair to call Blue Security’s spam solution a distributed denial-of-service attack on spammers. “In a DDoS attack a single person highjacks people’s computers….We have a community of people. Each one of them made the choice to complain about spam messages. We’re helping them.”
Reshef said Blue Security is born of frustration. “I was looking for a way to create some active…deterrents while maintaining a high ethical level,” he explained.
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