Blue Frog Reborn
Posted on | May 29, 2006 | 1 Comment
First there was Blue Frog, a community antispam effort that stopped operating last week after Blue Security, the company that started the project, came under a withering denial-of-service attack.
Out of the ashes comes Black Frog, part of a project that is apparently willing to become a flag bearer in the fight against spam. The project, dubbed Okopipi, is developing the Black Frog antispam software as an open-source project, according to the group’s wiki.
“This project aims to become a distributed replacement of antispam software Blue Frog,” the Okopipi wiki states. The project merges two separate efforts–Okopipi and Black Frog–that arose after the demise of Blue Frog.
Blue Security waged a sort of do-it-yourself spamming campaign against the spammers. It said that more than 500,000 customers downloaded its Blue Frog software, which automatically sent replies back to mass e-mails. If all of these customers’ systems responded, the spammers’ systems would be overwhelmed.
But the Web sites of Blue Security and some of the company’s partners were knocked out last month by a massive distributed denial-of-service attack. In such an attack, scores of computers try to continuously log onto Web sites, in an effort to overtax the servers.
News source: Okopipi Wiki
News source: Cnet
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One Response to “Blue Frog Reborn”
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Etcetera
June 1st, 2006 @ 12:22 am
Hey there, I’d just like to correct this story, it’s horribly factually innacurate
First off, no part of the project is called “Black Frog” due to possible trademark issues.
Secondly, Blue Security/Blue Frog did not send replies back to spammers – it first of all sent a polite message to the website that was advertsised in the spam message telling them to stop. If they didn’t then every client who then recieved a spam message with that website in then posted an opt-out request on that website (be it in an opt-out form OR an order form – and all of this was throttled so the system wasn’t “overwhelmed” at any point.
Regards,
Ehm