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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

Quick, someone cook up a ruby script to generate a million or so bogus logins to swamp any real logins they might have gotten so far. Pass it around.

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I have always wondered if that would work for spam too. What if we would set-up a bunch of servers to follow all links (times 10) in all spam messages. Even better, make it a plug-in for Outlook & Mail. Then, if a spammer would send out 100.000 messages he would immediately receive 1 million hits. No problem if you are authentically sending a few emails but a huge problem if you are sending out millions of mails.

If would be an active spam fighting solution instead of all the 'turn the other cheek' solutions that are popular right now...

Until they turn around and use it for DoS attacks.

I don't think either of us are advocating outright DOS attacks against the spammer/phisher. I'm also unsure as to why these were modded down. Even if everyone on the list simply manually provided one fake set of credentials, the noise added to the phisher's database might be sufficient to make the endevour useless.

Right now I'm guessing that most of the hits he gets are legit from fooled users. If we were somehow able to break the model by making 99.9% of all of the info gathered worthless, they might stop altogether. In any case it would provide some cover for the people who were fooled and supplied legit creds to have a million or so bogus ones surrounding them.

Yeah, but don't they already do that?

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