Real Ultimate Power

[shacker]

C|Net reports on the rise of drive-by spam, wherein spammers drive up to an unprotected, Wi-Fi equipped building and join the company LAN. To the system, they're now a legit user of the company network, so they can use the SMTP server without hindrance, and send out 10 million spams. Unprotected Wi-Fi networks won't last long

Comments

[wheelchair]

Around here, war driving/chalking has been a passtime for about a year now. It's kind of taken the place of drinking in parking lots. Hook your wireless up to the laptop and record the GPS of hot spots, post, share and log on.

[mrgrape]

This reminds me of the stories surrounding the vulnerability of wireless networks (that are not encrypted) to information hackers.

Even as tecnology progresses at a relentless pace, spammers and petty crooks (who imo are pretty close to each other on the scum scale), are just as fast.

how much spam?

[anonymous]

802.11b is only gonna let you send about 15-60K messages per 5-minute drive-by hit. That's maxing out the connection, doesn't say anything about rendering, addressing, queing the messages, not to mention the fact that no ISP in their right mind will let 50k messages get q'd by someone w/ a non-commercial account (will they)? of course the account owner might get yelled at....

we need 4 sparcs running somewhere between 18/5 and 24/7 to get out 20MM per month. of course our mail is rendered (assembled from queried data - user, user info, etc) and has a 1:1 recipient:message ratio. it's also opt-in, so not really *spam* per se. but still - wouldn't do us a damn bit of good to try to save BW by using hotspots, and i imagine only the most primitive spam campaign will get traction using that methodology.

b

Re: how much spam?

[shacker]

What do you mean by "rendering?" Point taken about queueing, etc. Most large companies would surely be on a commercial ISP acct of some kinds, but yeah, there could be mail restrictions. What do you mean by the 1:1 ratio? Spammers aren't concerned about saving bandwidth, they're just on the eternal quest to find a way to send at all. Traction isn't important to them - they just need to get a few mil msgs out fast. 2-3 days to have a site up before it's shut down is often all they hope for.