Yesterday IBM released an antispam software tool for Linux called FairUCE (what a great pun, UCE = unsolicited commercial email; fair use is the endangered copyright law provision, get it?) When it identifies an individual machine on the net as having sent spam, the free software bounces any messages sent by that machine back to the machine (rather than an email account which may or may not exist). The intended result is that the spamming machine is slowed to an unbearable crawl, reducing its ability to send more spam. The more a given machine spams, the more bounces get sent back.
Slashdot users’ reactions were mixed, with some concern about wasting bandwidth and characterizations of FairUCE being “just another challenge/response system.” One of the more interesting concerns voiced in the online community is that IBM’s software could be used to launch a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against someone by posing as a zombie computer sending spam purported to come from the DDOS target.
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