[PLUG] what is the point of PGP-signed emails?
Jason Van Cleve
jason at vancleve.com
Tue Dec 9 21:18:02 UTC 2003
Quoth Zot O'Connor, on Tue, 09 Dec 2003 16:41:22 -0800:
> Does it matter how long? As long as the time period is less than the
> point in time when 100% of the mail is read by victims, then it works.
Er, if a spammer can pump out 100,000 ads in an hour, but it takes days
to identify it, then "it works" doesn't mean much overall.
> If you want, you can hold all unknown mail for a period of time (2
> hours as a guess) until the peak time (when the spammer key is mostly
> likely identified and has been reported to the razor-PGP servers).
Two hours for a process which may take two days? Sounds like a lot of
inconvenience just to break off a little corner of spam traffic, doesn't
it?
> > Why would that make it harder? Keys can be generated easily enough,
> > and spamming from multiple servers (as is often done using RATs)
> > would make it even easier.
>
> Oh come on. By definition it is harder than what spammer can
> currently do.
Which hardly means it will slow down spam appreciably.
> 1) It forces them to send 1 mail per user. This greatly increases
> overheard *per* mail. Most spammers still bulk send their mail.
> 2) It makes them calculate keys per mail, and sigs per mail. Even
> milliseconds adds up when we are talking millions of mails.
Why is that? I thought only the body of the message is signed.
> 3) It may even make them have to keep those keys around. If the
> return contact is not via web/phone, they have a logistics issue.
Not sure what this means, sorry. They'll be creating arbitrary keys
just to get through filters. The contact method won't change.
> 4) All of these processes leave huge forensics trails.
How? A single virus can be written to gen' keys and send spam from a
compromised host.
> One of the main ways to attack spammer is to penny them to death. The
Great theory, like charging everyone a fraction of a penny for each
email sent. Thing is, spam is sent anonymously from hijacked servers.
(RATs are generating a third of it, for example.) So spammers won't
really feel it.
--Jason Van Cleve
--
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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