Compressing Lifecycles of Spam Campaigns

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Robert Mcmillan, at Network World, wrote about a volunteer project that works to shut down the websites that spammers depend on. 

Garth Bruen runs a volunteer project (www.kunjon.com) that tracks down the ISPs and domain name registrars used by spammers and arranges to have their sites shut down.

Gathering spam samples from a network of registered users (pay to join) and unregistered users (free), this project focuses on building the case against spammers and then presenting them to the ISPs who host the spam sites. With a claim of shutting down some 32,000 sites, Garth is pretty keen to eliminate the oxygen for the spammers to thrive.

This approach leverages facts provided by the University of California at San Diego and blogged here a few weeks ago. 

As I opined here on NetworkWorld.com, this is really about compressing the useful life of a spammer's campaign. If this technique (and others) can shorten the time between the start of a spam campaign and the disconnect of a spammer site, by say 50% of the current time, we can greatly impact the revenues of the spammer.

Who know, maybe someone will dream up zero-hour type technologies that can identify highly probable spam sites early and take automated action against them, just like they do for virus signatures before remediation fixes can be deployed.