Tool Puts Spammers Under Quarantine

Found on eWEEK on Monday, 01 November 2004
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Messaging security vendor CipherTrust Inc. on Monday released a new component of its IronMail appliances designed to stop spam messages before they get to customers' networks.

If a particular IP address racks up too many messages with scores of 100, the system drops connection attempts from those machines for a period of time, typically a few days.

Most spammers use rotating groups of proxies to send their messages and often will simply move on to another one if a particular IP address is blackholed. But that technique will be of little use against systems such as Connection Control that can quickly identify machines being used as bulk mailers and ignore them.

Warlick said Connection Control blocked nearly 4,000 individual IP addresses the first night that it was installed on Cox's internal network. The company's total mail volume dropped by about 40 percent.

It would be great if the blocked IPs would make their way into an open blacklist like Spamhaus. But when I read a price of $44,000 I doubt that this will happen. Some just try to make a lot of money with spam. This also raises the question if they really plan to stop spam; after all, that would kill their income.