Some of you may have been following the story of Blue Security - makers of the Blue Frog anti-spam tool - which has been targeted by some of the world's biggest spammers.
In a nutshell, Blue Frog has narked some spammers - particularly one they call "PharmaMaster" - into launching a huge attack on the company, its services, its users, its web hosts, the hosts of its blog and a bunch of other who were related in any way to Blue. (Bloggers may remember when service SixApart lost its service a couple of weeks back, or when Tucows bit the dust temporarily: that was part of this strike).
Just last week, founder Eran Reshef was proudly saying they'd fought off the threat, in a post on the company's site that said "the spammer's Doomsday Device failed. We're still here. We took some hits in this battle against spam, but we're winning the war..."
Last night, however, the company made a sharp about-face, announcing that it was withdrawing from the anti-spam business because it just didn't have the ability to outgun the spammers.
I spoke to Reshef yesterday, and wrote up the details in this story:
Reshef... said his company...was simply unable to become trapped in a war against a criminal group. "This is something that's really got to be left to governments to decide. To fight the spammers you really need to spend $100m."
My initial thoughts were that he might be disingenuous: after all, why would a company - a security company - willingly throw its hands up in the air and say "we give in"? Isn't that exactly what a security firm shouldn't do? Was the company on its last legs? Had its controversial "vigilante" methodology got the better of it? Were the owners just looking to build profile and flog off their technology?
Well, a ring around of people who knew better than me confirmed that this story seemed relatively legit. The company might not have been in rude health, but it had plenty of users. Affected service providers weren't happy, but they didn't blame Blue - they blamed the vicious spammer for the attack. What benefit does a security firm have to gain from saying "we haven't got the bottle"?
Whatever the case, Blue claims the spammers have beaten it into submission... and that's not good news for anybody.
So: spammers 1, security 0... where do we go from here?
