May 7, 2006: While everyone talks about Cyber War, some non-military organizations have gone ahead and started one. An Israeli firm, Blue Security, came up with a novel way to discourage spammers from sending spam to Blue Security customers. Once a company signs up with Blue Security, any spammer that hits that customer with unsolicited email, gets a flood of "no-thank-you" messages from Blue Security. This tends to clog the web sites of the spammers, and they don't like this at all. Blue Security has over half a million customers, and spammers are asked to not spam these customers, using a "no-not-spam" list Blue Security makes available. So some of the spammers are retaliating by trying to shut down the web sites of Blue Security customers, as well as the Blue Security site.

It's all about the money. Spammers have gone into business big time, are better organized, and are making big bucks these days. That's all worth fighting for. The spammers are generally above the law, by virtue of hiding out in countries that go easy on spammers, and covering their tracks. But using the Internet as a battleground can interfere with other users, including military and government users. This would attract the kind of attention the spammers would rather avoid. This could get interesting, and disruptive.