Fighting Fire with Fire?
May 10th, 2006 | by Craig |The technical details are extremely thin in this article about a phishing scheme that is affecting a regional bank. In fact, the article only says that the anti-phishing company, MarkMonitor, “…responded by flooding the Taiwanese Web site with e-mails and shutting it down within 18 hours.”
I’d be interested to know how they managed this. It sounds like they set up a DoS attack against the phishers.
Believe me, in my book, you can’t find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than phishers and spammers, but I wonder if hitting back with DoS is the Right Thing™ to do. After all, bandwidth is a limited resource, and flooding the backbones with packets designed to take one website down will certainly effect many other websites, not to mention all other Internet traffic as well.
Maybe I’m reading the article wrong, and they’re using a different method, but I’m not sure of any other way to bring down a web site other than to have the owner or provider pull the plug.
One Response to “Fighting Fire with Fire?”
By Gman on May 10, 2006 | Reply
It seems to me that you would have to have a pretty empty cranial space to fall for something like phishing.