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Blue Frogs Consume Spam
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-01-24
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Blue Security announced their expanding the capabilities of their Blue Frog spam reporting software to work with Google's gmail, Yahoo's mail and MSN's hotmail. The new service will be a dramatic expansion of their product originally offered back during the summer.
The premise behind the software is for users to send a report back to Blue Security via their Frog. Then Blue Security registers a complaint with the company being advertised in the spam. With enough of these complaints, the spammers eventually take note. Originally, the service used honeypots to do the work for them. They've since changed this service. Now, spam must be reported or else it won't make it to the list.
This service has attracted more than 100,000 email addresses to their "Do Not Intrude Registry" in the six months or so it's been in existence. Over half of their users have seen significant reductions in spam.
At this point the focus for Gmail, Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail is for Firefox by Mozilla but they do have plans to expand this. Since they've gone open source, they've also come up with an attachment for Mozilla Thunderbird.
In talking to company founder Eran Reshef, he said he's gotten feed back from spammers as well. He said they've talked to about 25 different spammers and they seem don't mind what he's doing. "Freedom isn't free. If you're willing to stand up and say something about it, they will listen."
"Spammers don't want to fool with a 100,000 whining complainers. They don't have the time and resources to waste on them."
He also said in the Blue Security statement, "Webmail users have never had appropriate protection from the increasing threats of unsolicited e-mail messages," said Eran Reshef, founder and CEO of Blue Security. "Spam filters are not enough. For the first time, Blue Frog allows webmail users to actively fight spam by automatically reporting the messages from their webmail application, without the fear of exposing themselves to further solicitation or retribution."
Blue Community members register their e-mail addresses in the Do Not Intrude Registry and install the Blue Frog application on their machines. After messages are reported to Blue Security for analysis, the Blue Frog posts ‘opt-out' requests on the sites advertised by spam, asking spammers to remove registered addresses from their mailing lists and stop sending unsolicited e-mail to Blue Community members. The Do Not Intrude Registry empowers users to exercise their right under the CAN-SPAM Act, to securely and automatically opt-out of spam.
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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