Blue Security Gives Up, Ceases Anti-Spam Operations!

May 16 2006, 9:46pm

I must say that I’m shocked at the way things have developed in the last 2 weeks. First, Blue Security gets heavily attacked by a heavyweight Russian spammer. Then, it defiantly restarted operation… until now. BlueSecurity.com is now documenting its last days on its home page. I’ve re-posted their surrender here for you. When we founded Blue Security in 2004, we believed that if we automated a way for users to rise up and exercise their rights under the CAN-SPAM Act, we could reduce the amount of spam on the Internet. Over the past few months we were able to leverage the power of the Blue Community and convince top spammers responsible for sending over 25% of the world’s spam to comply with our users’ opt-out list. We were making real progress in eliminating spam from the lives of our users. However, several leading spammers viewed this change as a strategic threat to their spam business. The week before last, these spammers launched a series of attacks against us, taking down hundreds of thousands of other websites via a massive Denial-of-Service attack and causing damage to ISPs, website owners and Internet users worldwide. They also began a relentless campaign of email intimidation against many members of the Blue Community. After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations. As we cannot build the Blue Security business on the foundation we originally envisioned, we are discontinuing all of our anti-spam activities on your behalf and are exploring other, non spam-related avenues for our technological developments. As much as it saddens us, we believe this is the responsible thing to do. You need not do anything as a result of this change. We will continue to protect your names and addresses and honor all privacy commitments we made to you. We have concluded we should not take Blue Security to the full deployment stage we originally planned to achieve, but we are proud of what we have accomplished thus far as a young startup company. We are extremely proud to have had the chance to work with such a devoted and dedicated community: thank you for the vote of confidence you gave us over the past few months as well as the particularly vocal support you have shown over the last two weeks. We will be innovating and building our technology in new, other directions and will continue to give back to you, our Community. Thank you for your support, The Blue Security Team. Has the Blue Security homepage been hacked? If not, then it may explain why my BlueFrog software has not been able to connect the past few days. When did they offically give up? I’m truly dissappointed that a good idea did not gain more traction. I want to add that I did not condone the methods that they employed to combat the spammer’s DOS attacks. Every war, even those on the internet, must have its casaulties and unfortunately, email users will still have to put up with spammers. That’s where I don’t like the message to end up being. Update: Wired News seems to be the first of the major internet publications to write about this story too. They broke the news 4 hours before I made my surprised visit to Blue Security. Update 2: As far as I can tell, Guardian Unlimited was the next one with their copy. I’m glad to feel that blogs can break stories with the best of them!