When the project launched, KnujOn tracked just a few thousand websites in its database, but that number has now grown to several hundred thousand. Interestingly, the total number of spamming groups has remained constant—somewhere around 50. "There really aren't many people involved in this," Bruen said.

That's one reason why people like Bruen think that they can make a real difference by targeting the Web. Though critics say that KnujOn may end up fighting the same war of attrition that has already occurred with e-mail blocking, Bruen thinks he can eventually wear the spammers out. "There's a point of exhaustion where they run out of places to go," he said.

KnujOn isn't the only group targeting spammer websites. Earlier this month, Computer Cops, the company that runs the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination (PIRT) phishing takedown program, expanded its efforts and began doing the same thing.

Computer Cops believes many of the spamming groups are responsible for a lot of other online crime. "We're trying to take a look at all of the Internet crime out there and do criminal profiles," said Paul Laudanski, the company's owner and the leader of the PIRT project. Crime-fighting groups that focus only on spam or phishing don't get the full picture, he added. "If one organization is only focusing on one thing, they're missing a lot of criminal activity."

Scott Conti recently signed on as one of KnujOn's 1,300 registered contributors because he liked the project's Web-centric approach. "There aren't many people going back to the source," said Conti, the director of information technology at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Mass. "That's what I thought was interesting about it. They are actually trying to take a proactive approach by going after the sites and going after the ISPs that are hosting them."

Greenfield College is now contributing between 50 and 100 spam samples per week to KnujOn, and in return it gets back information it can use to blacklist spam sites.

The college needs all the help it can get. About 96 percent of the 90,000 e-mail messages processed each day by Greenfield's IT department are spam, Conti said.

It's one of his biggest headaches, Conti said. "We probably get more vocal complaining about spam than just about any other problem we're likely to have."