Spam wars have finally erupted. Unfortunately, round one goes to the spammers, as Blue Frog has stopped its service.

Blue Frog was a simple idea; you register for their service and then report an email as spam. Human beings read through the mail and check if it is indeed spam, and if so, the company sends a complaint to the company responsible for the spam (i.e. the company whose product was advertised in the spam mail). The end user’s email was never revealed to the spammers and should they choose to, they could get their email lists cleared from all email addresses registered in the Blue Frog database.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And it was working too, as some did accept to stop sending spam to those that were aligned with Blue Frog.

But here is what happened next. Some spammers didn’t want to stop, so they did two things;

1. request their email lists cleaned and then compared which addresses were removed and had a list of those addresses that were aligned with Blue Frog. This enabled them to distribute that particular list and over all spam increased for those registered with spammers.
2. One spammer in particular, some say a Russian spammer, started threatening the company and then launched a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) on the company’s server. This one attack was much more successful than anyone could imagine or anyone has done so far, as it not only affected Blue Frog’s servers but their blog servers as well which was not owned by them. This in turn crippled many people that had nothing to do with this situation. This one spammer informed Blue Frog that this was just one attack and that the next time he would launch a virus at them. Under those conditions, Blue Frog capitulated and shut down operations.

You can read the following for a complete history:

• Antispam list gets spammed
• Blue Security attack linked to blog crashes
• Antispam advocate succumbs to spammer

However, people are now criticizing Blue Frog for being too aggressive, like Richi Jennings, an analyst at the security research company Ferris, who said that Blue Frog was fighting fire with fire. So a new project was created, one that merged with Okopipi, and is now developing a new software. It will try to do what Blue Frog failed to do, as the wiki for the project states that it will not create DDoS attacks of its own but rather stick to legitimate complaints about spam.

The cyberwar is on…