'Honeypot' carries sting for spammers

A California company wants to let thousands of users collaborate to disable the websites spammers use to sell their wares.

Blue Security's Blue Frog software creates additional addresses, known as honeypots, designed to do nothing but attract spam.

If a honeypot receives spam, Blue Security tries to warn the spammer. Then it triggers the Blue Frog software on a user's computer to send a complaint automatically.

Thousands complaining at once will knock out a website and thus encourage spammers to stop sending email to the "do-not-spam" list.

A leading anti-spam advocate, however, criticised the initiative as being no more than a denial-of-service attack, the technique hackers use to shut down a website by overwhelming it with fake traffic.

"It's the worst kind of vigilante approach," said John Levine, a board member with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.

"Deliberate attacks against people's websites are illegal."

Eran Reshef, Blue Security founder and chief executive, said Blue Frog merely allowed users to collectively make complaints.