Erik Jackson, the Editor of The Panama News, very briefly explains why his site is off the air here.
Paul Laudanski, co-founder of Castle Cops, a volunteer platform against malware and spam gangs, very aptly notes that the activity of spam gangs is a threat that is hugely underrated:
This is a serious issue as it represents an escalation of cyber criminals to disrupt and intimidate the those who fight against electronic fraud. This is in effect cyber-terrorism.
Brian Krebs blogged on the Washington Post about the issue, earlier this week:
Spammers have been attacking and threatening several of the groups and individuals who have been performing some of the most important work in hobbling online scams, spam and computer viruses.
[...]
Last month, a number of anti-spam Web sites came under a sustained "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack, an electronic assault during which the attackers use thousands of compromised personal computers to overwhelm a target with so much bogus traffic that the PCs can't accommodate legitimate visitors.
The attacks were made possible by tens of thousands - perhaps millions - of computers infected by the recent e-mail virus known as the "Storm worm. The virus links all infected computers into a peer-to-peer data network using the same technology as the eDonkey file-sharing network. The attackers later instructed the networked machines to attack sites such as spam trackers Spamhaus and the personal Web site of Joe Stewart, the SecureWorks researcher who conducted some of the most detailed analysis of the Storm worm.
The Web sites for CastleCops -- an all-volunteer, online scam fighting community -- also have been under a consistent denial-of-service attack for the past couple of weeks. Its main site and user forum are not working again this morning. Security Fix has spotlighted the laudable work this volunteer group does in bringing down phishing Web sites and analyzing new malicious software.
The case of The Panama News, the implications of a spam gang shutting down a news outlet is just one other grim reminder of the immense cost of not dealing harshly with the criminal outfits out there, wrecking the Net.
Enough is enough.
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