NEWS

Blue Security's Anti-Spam Community

ISP-Planet
December 5, 2005
Alex Goldman

There's plenty you could do about spam, if you had the time. Eran Reshef says you should let his team fight your spam fight for you.

Spamming those who have spammed you is an old dream. If it worked, as this old User Friendly cartoon suggests it might, it would be powerful. But any attempt to set up such a system or program could break the law and could be turned by spammers themselves against innocent targets. Using marketers against other marketers would also be wrong.

But one company aims to take the dream and make it real, while supporting law enforcement instead of violating the law with vigilantism.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Blue Security (which has major research and development offices in Israel) has a novel solution to the spam problem.

Co-founder and CEO Eran Reshef, on the phone from Israel, says that there's a lot that you can do about spam, especially if you're an ISP, but that you probably don't have the time to do everything you could for each e-mail that hits your network. For example, for each piece of spam you could:

Notify the registrar of the domain being advertised
Notify the host or ISP of the business being advertised
Inform the appropriate government agency (the FDA for Viagra, the FTC for scams, the SEC for stock pump and dump, etc.)
Inform the company whose copyright is being violated (such as Microsoft or Adobe for pirated software, Phizer or others for drugs, etc.)
Inform police in appropriate areas, including Interpol for international crime
And that's just a partial list.

Reshef says Blue Security makes sure the data is useful to the agencies to which it is sent. "We don't send a report about every spam message; We send a weekly report. To the FDA, for example, we report only illegal drug spam. If you want to report spam to the authorities, we can probably do a better job unless you spend hours each day doing it yourself."

In addition to all of this, the company is maintaining a "do not intrude" list. "We have 65,000 e-mail addresses in our registry," Reshef says. So when Blue Security reports a spam problem, it reports up to 65,000 instances of that spam.

Not a noob
Reshef is a startup veteran (if there is such a thing) and this is his third company. Founded in 2004, the company raised $3 million from Benchmark Capital in April, 2005 in its "seed round" and might well be able to raise more money in the future, if necessary.

Our immediate question was a simple one: "How will you make money?"

If he can prove that it works, Reshef expects that corporations will pay for the service. Meanwhile, the company plans to be in beta for a long time. "We will run in beta for some time," he says. "Once we're out of public beta, we plan to go to enterprises to offer a way to get rid of spam that works."

Talking to spammers
When he can, Reshef talks to spammers. Several spammers, he claims, are now in compliance with his list.

The one spammer he said he could admit to having met is Amir Gans, reputed to be responsible for half of the spam in Israel. Reshef says he had the opportunity to meet Gans at a conference because Reshef was talking to a reporter who had an interview scheduled with Gans. "I asked him if he would like to speak to Blue Security. We went to lunch with the reporter, I explained what I do and he said he wished to comply with our do not intrude list, and he has."

Planning for victory, and for hard work
Reshef is using every anti-spam tactic he can think of, and says that it won't be an easy fight to win. "This is not a quick fix. You want a quick fix? A lot of people figure out that filtering will not solve the problem. Over the long term, spam keeps growing and growing. This is a project with a real chance to change the spam equation."

If spam is defeated, he expects many companies to fall back on legal marketing tactics. "As long as the marketing is done legally, that's fine."

He says that the targets are quite visible. Some spammers, such as Gans, are well known. Some companies are also well known. "About ten pharmacies in the U.S. are sending most of the medical spam."

Already, Reshef says that list members are reporting some success. "It depends on who has your addresses. Most members find that some spammers comply and some do not. They see some reduction in spam but not a complete reduction. But they understand it's a process we're all working on together."

That's why Reshef is particularly eager to reach out to the ISP industry. While he'd love to enroll ISPs and their users in the program, he also wants webhosts and registrars to know about Blue Security in the event that he needs to contact them about spam.

It is not guaranteed to succeed, but it is valiant anti-spam effort, using means that are legal and powerful. The R&D center is growing and now has "about twenty people."

In January, 2004, Bill Gates promised that spam would be defeated by 2006. As that date approaches, ISPs will continue to search for solutions, and they will probably not be looking to Microsoft for the answer.