The good folks from the CBC dropped by Tucows World HQ this morning to chat about spam, botnets, DDOS attacks etc. The story will air this evening, so if you are within arms reach of an internet connection or TV set that can tune into "The National" tonight, yours truly and a few of our intrepid weekend staffers will be featured for a few seconds at some point during the national newscast.
In doing background for this story, I learned quite a few new things about the subject. I was amazed at how quickly the sophistication of botnets is ramping up. The internet community really needs to come to grips with the scope of this problem and start getting creative with the problem solving. I keep hearing that laws and governments don't really figure into the solutions for a whole bunch of really smart reasons (privacy, costs, etc.) but I'm wondering how governments can apply some focused pressure in specific areas so that the economic equation changes slightly so that is a higher level of profit to be found on the white hat side of the fence. If spam fighters could make a real buck fighting spam and other network abuse, smarter people could be deployed to look at the problems, smarter technology would emerge, and we might not end up in the situation that's being predicted now where close to 100% of all mail is spam (estimates indicate that 87-95% of all email traffic is spam right now...). If the white hats could make as much money doing this as the black hats, don't we put ourselves in a position where we might be able to have a fair fight?
Anyways, CBC Newsworld @ 9pm EST, CBC National @ 10pm. I'll post a link to an online version for those of you that don't have access to Canadian television if I can dig one up (the CBC does a ton of mediacasting over the internet, so I should be able to find *something*.
There's not an awful lot of money to be made in the anti-spam space right now. Not nearly enough to get the attention of the serious money anyways. I'm thinking it might take some sort of regulatory distortion to get a better distribution of cash. A forcing mechanism, a la the Y2K roll-over might be what it takes to get some serious attention paid to innovating the solutions at a faster rate than the black hats.