Blue Security

I decided to write another post on Blue Security. Why another? On the left, you can find a Technorati graph, showing the number of posts mentioning Blue Security in the past 90 days. "Blue Security" is one of the top 15 searches on Technorati right now. You can also see the increase on the Blue Security site on Alexaholic.

Why is that? By now, many people have read that Blue Security has been attacked by spammers that are fearing their offering. The attacks have been followed by a DOS attacks on Blue Security, Typepad, and LiveJournal.

So what's the big deal? First of all, Blue Security is an Israeli company, backed by Benchmark, and was founded by Eran Reshef. I know Eran, since Gemini actually funded his previous company, Sanctum (Currently part of Watchfire). Blue Security decided to take a different angle at Anti-Spam, as their own website states:

"Blue Security's Do Not Intrude Registry is a ground-breaking solution for proactively fighting spam and enabling users to restore their e-mail to a safe, efficient and effective form of communication."

The idea is quite simple:  You add your email to a "do not intrude" list, and spammers will be notified if they send you spam. If the spammers don't stop, Blue Security will "fight back" by Active Deterrence^TM . You can find additional information on their offering here.

So, why am I writing about these guys? First of all, Like many other email users (I assume), I got many "Blue Security" emails (spams) in the past few days. It included A LOT of information on the company, and I found it to be a bit scary. It seems like a real war is going on.

In addition, I have a few thoughts on this:

1. Spam is a real problem, but Anti Spam is even a bigger problem. It's very hard to find solutions that filter out all the real spam, and don't touch the good emails. The amazing thing, is that the anti spam always catches GREAT emails (The important email from a customer you have been waiting for...)
2. The current anti-spam solutions don't work (I should say, that my previous company Commtouch is known to have a great solution, but I did not try it out).
3. The Blue Security offering is unique, and takes a whole different approach. The "war" that is flooding the news these days is interesting. It means that the spammers care about Blue Security, but it's not clear who will "win".

Finally, another great case where an Israeli company thinks "out of the box". I hope Blue Security will succeed for 2 reasons: I will get less Spam AND Israel will be famous for another GOOD reason.

Comments

[Spy der Mann]

"A LOT of information". Bleh. They just did a WHOIS on bluesecurity.com and pasted the results.

It's publicly available. But this spam (I've received it too) makes me think they might be threatening to launch a second DDOS attack on Blue Security's DNS servers. (This could be interpreted as an "I know where you live" threaten).

I have an idea that might work: 1. Make Blue Frog client-only. No server.
2. Calculate a hash on your e-mail, and post it to the spammers' websites instead to remove _YOU_ from their list.
3. No "do not intrude" list, just your mail and perhaps another 2 or 3 random hashes.

3. Since there's no website, no DDOS attack could be done.

I posted this idea on Sourceforge and on my /. journal.

[Yaniv Golan]

Check out also the post in the.co.ils on Blue Security, I found their view on this quite interesting!