Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 5, 2025 17:06 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source) by dskoll
Parent article: Debian to require Rust as of May 2026

Sorry, another followup. Another thing is you're not thinking like a criminal. A criminal won't be deterred by micro-payments or by having to use compute because they'll just steal those things from innocent victims. We already see compromised devices being massively weaponised in botnets. A botnet has vastly more computing power than you'll ever need to break through proof-of-work anti-spam systems.

Email insecurity (was One of the great benefits of Open Source)

Posted Nov 6, 2025 11:29 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

But then the economic value of the resource (the compute power, or the micro-payment currency value) outweighs the economic benefit of sending the spam. The criminal will just use the stolen resource directly - not send spam.