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Fighting The Spammers Down Under
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is running an interesting article about fighting spammers. It mentions that "Most of today's email spam, however, comes from a handful of culprits, described by Barry and others as "known criminals"." Does anybody else wonder who these people are, and what are the odds of having them shut down for good?"
When I get spam, I report it on spamcop. It is a free service [with pay options, please pay and keep it going!] that will analyze your e-mail and headers looking for legitimate source IPs, open relays and websites mentioned in the spam and then look up the e-mail addresses to send anonymous reports on your behalf. You can also sign up for spam-free e-mail and buy a paid subscription to spamcop reporting. I can't say whether it has worked or not, but I feel better knowing open relays are being noted and that sysadmins are being notified! Link.
adam.
In addition to the usual anti-spam methods:
one can block IP addresses that attempt to spam on a regular basis. Tools such
- ipchains
- netfilter/iptables
- ipFilter
can be configured to block frequent spammer IP addresses from your SMTP ports.The following is a list of IP addresses that we have observed spamming on a regular basis. Blocking these sites won't solve your spam problem. On the other hand blocking common spam locations as part of an overall anti-spam system will help.
Sorry if your IP address is in the above list. If you are not a spammer then it could be that you happen to be using an ISP that tolerates spammers (or is unable/unwilling to block them), or you work for a company that spam, or you are near a poorly configured and poorly maintained site that is abused as an open relay.
chongo (was here)
This is where I gloat a wee bit about living in the UK. We have a lovely service called the Telephone Preference Service. Anyone making unsolicited commercial calls must cleanse their lists against the TPS list, or be guilty of a criminal offence.
Since registering a year ago, we've maybe had five calls, all of whom hang up really quickly once you start asking them for their details to report them to the TPS.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
A friend of mine here in the UK has recently suffered a nasty fate at the hands of some very active spammers... they faked a reply-to address in his domain (summerisle.demon.co.uk).
.com.
The result was that, for a period of about two and a half weeks in January, David was receiving over 1000 bounced emails a day, effectively mailbombing his account. With a pay-per-minute 56K modem as his only internet access, it wasn't a pretty sight.
The spammers that sends this stuff out, who identify themselves as 'Global Advertising Systems' and 'Universal Advertising Systems' claim to be based in Billings, MT. You may have seen some of their handiwork in your own mailbox with subjects like 'Increase energy levels', 'Become a Judgement Processing Professional', 'Child Support-Investigator'. They're very effective at covering their tracks - the only contact information is PO Box, telephone and fax numbers in the US, plus disposable eMail address and a snail-mail PO box in Aruba if you want to be 'removed'. All the mail originates in the Phillippines (with the obligatory faked additional headers added) then gets punted out through open relays around the world. Complaints to the ISPs in the Phillipines get no reply or bounced.
Fortunately, I'm lucky enough to have DSL, so I was able to filter the stuff out and forward it on to another account - OK if you've got the bandwidth, but not a proper solution.
The scary bit is that it seems like there's no other defence against this kind of activity. The ISP hosting the domain's POP box sympathised, but said they couldn't do anything to delete this incoming junk before it was delivered. UK & Billings, MT police and the FBI said no crime had been committed and taking private legal action across the Atlantic is a bit out of the reach of a one-man recording studio. My friend's frustrated reaction to another attack this week has been to dump the domain and move elsewhere with a new
If anyone else has any more information on these b*st*rds or ideas for wreaking revenge I'd be interested to hear.
No matter who they are, fight them with razor! razor is a distributed, collaborative spam detection and filtering network, and it rocks. I hardly get any spam anymore, and if I get one, I can report it to the network, and other razor users won't see that email anymore.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Experience shows that blocking SPAM at source is impossible today. The fight should be directed at beneficiaries of spam (clients of spammers). And the only effective remedy is blocklists like SPEWS.
Your friend could fight the spam indirectly if he persuaded his ISP (demon.co.uk) to adopt SPEWS filter. That would block mosf of ISPs that host spam beneficiary sites from demon.co.uk. When ALL their clients lose access to this large European provider (demon) - then ISPs would definetely notice and take action against the spammers. If not too late for themselves... (check out this tearfull public apology from a spammer at news.admin.net-abuse.email).
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Titles of posts should start with "[email]". You can also mail to the automaton at nanas-sub@cybernothing.org from a throwaway address to avoid attracting more spam. You would not think spammers would bother scraping addresses from anti-spam newsgroups, but Rule 3 says "Spammers are stoopid".
Regardless of submission method, you probably want to obscure your email address within your contribution.
In the states it is illegal for telemarketers to call mobile phones. I always give me mobile phone number on forms that ask for it, and over the past five years I've not received one telemarketer, because their systems know my number is a cell phone.
Of course this becomes different when an email account is linked to a phone. Shouldn't there be some easy way to say spamming that email address is illegal because it goes to your cell phone? After a certain number of email messages a month, I pay for it...