Internet terrorism? Yup, you heard me - however in this case the terrorism isn't instigated by an organisation of religous zealots or fanatical lunatics, but one, yes one, greedy spammer. Here's the story, mostly quoted direct from an article by John Leyden on The Register about a week ago:

A company named Blue Security established a 'Do Not Intrude Registry' - similar to the Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing - with around 450,000 members (one of the email utilities I used was hooked up to their service). With the stand-alone service, participants downloaded a small tool called Blue Frog which systematically floods the websites of spammers with opt-out messages. Depending on your point of view, this initiative can either be viewed as community action or vigilantism. In my opinion it's giving the spammer a taste of his own medicine, however it seems like the spammer took exception to having to reap what he sowed.

Last month, members of the Blue community received aggressive spam messages in an attempt to intimidate users into dropping out of Blue Security's network - even ordinary punters who had nothing to do with Blue Security received the same messages, which proved that the belligerent junk mail campaign was not a focussed effort but an all-out campaign.

This campaign of intimidation was followed by a sophisticated denial of service attack against Blue Security's website. According to Blue Security, a renegade Russian language speaking spammer known as PharmaMaster succeeded in bribing a top-tier ISP's staff member into black holing Blue Security's former IP address (194.90.8.20) at internet backbone routers. This rendered Blue's main website inaccessible outside Israel.

After Blue made configuration changes to point users towards its TypePad-hosted weblog, bluesecurity.blogs.com, PharaMaster upped the ante by launching a massive denial of service attack against TypePad and any other organisation associated with Blue Security. The attack forced Six Apart (which runs TypePad, Live Journal, and created Movable Type) offline, leaving the information superhighway temporarily bereft of the outpourings of numerous bloggers. LiveJournal and TypePad users in particular may recall this - it was around 4pm Pacific Daylight Time on the 2nd May, which was about 3 weeks ago. The sophisticated attack also disrupted the net operations of five top-tier hosting providers in the US and Canada, as well as a major DNS provider for several hours.

"We didn't think PharmaMaster would go to extreme of launching a denial of service attack against so many organisations. With 20-20 hindsight we wouldn't have made these configuration changes, but at the time we didn't think he'd go so far," Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef told El Reg at the time. "My mistake was not anticipating he'd go berserk." Blue reckons PharmaMaster hired a botnet to launch the assault. During an ICQ conversation, PharmaMaster told Blue Security that if he can't send spam, there will be no internet. What a wanker.

After the attack, Blue Security embarked on restoring its community-based anti-spam service to its members. But after working closely with its service providers and partners to help resolve the problems over the previous two weeks, it came to the conclusion that the risk of further attacks remained too great. Despite moving hosting providers and implementing security defences, Blue reckoned it would be unable to safely reintroduce its controversial service without exposing other members of the net community to potential attack.

"It's clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don't have the authority to start," Reshef told WashingtonPost.com. "Our users never signed up for this kind of thing."

Blue's decision to shut up shop is understandable but regrettable, because it represents a significant victory by a spammer in the fight to control the internet. In effect, PharmaMaster has succeeded in his main aim of getting Blue Security to dismantle.

What this article doesn't emphasize is the fact that one single person managed to cause so much damage, shut down millions of sites temporarily, hold major ISP's and a security company to ransom, and get away with it. Why? For fear of repeat attacks. Gee, that sounds familiar, doesn't it? hmm, can someone say 'Mohammed cartoon'? What the people who make these decisions need to realize is that by bowing to the demands of these greedy self-centered spammers (likewise with Islamofacists) they are only encouraging it to happen more often. How many other spammers have seen what this one spammer has done and will follow in his footsteps and make threats of attacks in order to get what they want? How much more damage will be done in the long run because nobody has the balls to do something about it now? Hell, this spammer should be hunted down just like any other terrorist - he may not be taking lives, but spam costs the international economy trillions of dollars every year in labor hours, IT costs, the spread of virii and all sorts of other related costs. I think spending a bit of money in the short term to take these spammers out would be much better for the long term. Or maybe not - because the execs running the ISP's are just as greedy as the spammers, and they don't want to spend any more money than they have to if it means cutting into their profits. This is a very good reason for having an international independant authority to make sure the interests, ideals and the very nature of the internet itself are not compromised.

The top-tier ISP that black holed Blue Security should be fined substantially, and the staff member at that ISP who did the deed should be spending time in jail. It is the responsibility of all ISPs to work to catch these people, and those who are caught should be locked up and never allowed access or involvement with the internet again in any way whatsoever - for life. When one spammer can say that if he can't send spam, there will be no internet, and get away with it, then the future looks bleak - be prepared for a lot more down time and more and more restrictions placed on innocent users because of a greedy few assholes like this arrogant son of a bitch PharmaMaster.

Here's an idea - whenever you get a spam email, forward it to your ISP. Maybe they'll get the hint and do more to combat these parasitic scum.