Child Porn Accusation As Online Extortion Tactic

Glenn writes "There's a story on silicon.com about a new twist in the tactics used by online extortionists trying to blackmail ecommerce sites with denial of service attacks. Yesterday one blackmailer threatened to send out child pornography emails in UK gambling site Blue Square's name if it didn't pay up 7000 Euros." This sounds even worse than simple DoS threats.

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[YetAnotherName]

Mod parent up, certainly. But bear in mind also that SMTP was born in an environment that never foresaw such threats. DNS, TCP, UDP, and IP were also started in such an environment, and are also buckling under the abuses (address spoofing, SYN floods, etc.)

When do we have to replace the entire Internet? Or is IPv6 sufficiently robust?

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[isorox]

Digital signing would solve that problem, but of course it's the chicken and egg.

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[Kenja]

So a communications protocol made people collect child pornography to be used as an extortion tool? And how is removing anonymity and privacy from the Internet a good thing? I for one LIKE that I can send an email without the receiver getting my home address.

Dumbest Idea Ever.

[ntxb229]

I mean honestly... if you got an email with child porn, and it was from [e-mail], is your first response going to be "Oh my gosh! What an awful company!!" Please... how stupid do you think people are? Well on second thought...

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[hitmark]

supposedly this is what sender id is supposed to fix but then the servers must allow for people hooked up by outside isps to hook up and send mail via the account connected to that isp. why? i more and more often get questions from people that have used a subscription-free isp to hook up via dialup but have now moved on to a isp that supply dsl or similar. then when they try to send a mail they get a error as the ip they are on are outside of the old isps range. usualy all it takes to fix the problem is to change the smtp to the one the new isp have set up. but if sender id comes online then this will no longer work. and email addresses have become connected to people just like cellphone numbers have in peoples minds...

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[Zangief]

Phase 1: Retire SMTP
Phase 2: Panic
Phase 3: Develop, implement and distribute new e-mail sending system (maybe profit)

Personally, I fear Phase 2!

But...your fear is developing according to your plan...so it is good, isn't it?

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[Anonymous Coward]

This actually happened to my company a few months ago. They said that they would send out just pornographic material in my company's name. I asked to get on the list, but I got no reply. I just let the lawyer handle reporting it to authorities.

Seriously, who is going to fall for such ridiculous scams. Is someone really going to believe that a game company is going to email porn? Idiots.

Re:heh

[JeanBaptiste]

really? wow. I didn't even write a single line of code!

I'm going to have to use slashdot as a programming interface more often.

I swear...

[indros13]

that sort of thing ain't my bag, baby.

Re:It's all SMTP's fault!

[Ryosen]

>>Of course, the systems currently being discussed do NOT require the domain administrator to "bless" a mail server

Isn't that usually the Rabbi's job?