Anti-spam firm Blue Security has a controversial technique: they established a ‘Do Not Intrude Registry’ and participants downloaded a small tool, called Blue Frog, which systematically flooded the websites of spammers with opt-out messages.
In an escalating conflict in April, a spammer known as PharmMaster used increasingly disruptive techniques to attack Blue Security’s business. This culminated in PharaMaster launching a massive denial of service attack against organisations associated with Blue Security. The attack disrupted the net operations of five top-tier hosting providers in the US and Canada, as well as a major DNS provider for several hours.
Faced with this level of aggression, Blue Security has given up, "It's clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don't have the authority to start," Reshef Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef told washingtonpost.com. "Our users never signed up for this kind of thing."
Regardless of whether you think Blue Security’s methods were acceptable, this makes it clear that, on the Internet, the biggest bully wins, and the spammers are the biggest bullies.