Wired News has reported that an Israeli antispam company had decided to close shop after a vicious spam attack that took down its database server and several other sites:

In an interview with Wired News, Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef said the Israel-based company was closing its service Wednesday since he did not want to be responsible for an ever-escalating war that could bring down internet service providers and websites around the world and subject its users to denial-of-service attacks from a well-organized group in control of a massive army of computer drones.

“Our community would very much like us to continue on the fight against spam, and our community has grown over the last week,” Reshef said. “But at the end of the day if we continue doing so, within a few days, major websites will go down. I don’t feel that this is something I can be responsible for. I cannot go ahead and rip up the internet to make Blue Security work. This is not the decision a commercial entity can make.”

A concerted effort against spam should be taken by all concerned. It’s getting out of hand. For a day, I receive about 120 spam emails in my Yahoo! account; I do not even dare take a look at my Gmail account’s spam box, since that email address is what I usually use in online services and fora.