ORBZ Shuts Down

Tim Jackson writes: "In a depressing development for those wanting to protect themselves against spam, it appears that popular open relay database ORBZ (formerly at www.orbz.org) has shut down effective immediately - see here for the final post from ORBZ admin Ian Gulliver on the ORBZ list explaining the reasons behind the closure. The 'Lotus Domino' issue he refers to is the issue he discovered in the course of running ORBZ and reported to Buqtraq, which means that certain SMTP envelopes (such as those sent by ORBZ when testing for open relays) cause Lotus Domino servers to go into a loop, effectively creating a DoS situation. Unfortunately (but understandably), irrelevant of the merits of the case, Ian doesn't want to risk jail for the sake of spam fighting. Of course, if common sense prevailed, it would be the mail server vendor in court for producing insecure mail server software, not a third party for happening to send requests that unintentionally crash poorly-written servers."

Comments

yeah right....

[reaper20]

Of course, if common sense prevailed, it would be the mail server vendor in court for producing insecure mail server software.

And that would leave us with how many commercial mail servers? None. :)

More laws like this will only make things worse. One thing we have seen proven time and time again (SSSCA, DMCA), is that legislation of technology by people who don't understand or are influenced by people who don't understand it is that it does not work.

I'd bet that nine out of ten 'insecure' or 'spamfriendly' open relays are human related errors. Granted, using sendmail is like playing with a loaded gun with the trigger welded down, but it is possible, and other MTAs are pretty damn secure and fast (I like Postfix).

Re:Sounds weak to me

[Junta]

Well, in any case it is good to get DoS bugs fixed.

But with regards to IDing the server, you can't with certainty determine what SMTP server is running. Sure you can make a reasonable guess based on what strings follow the numbers during the SMTP transaction, but for some mailservers this is configurable or even could be disabled.

Let's say there was an envelope type that postfix occasionally lets through. Now, if the admin of that for some reason actually wants to exploit this to have an open mail relay, it could fake the strings to make it look like a server that wouldn't get probed for it...

In any case, I started work for a company and one of the first things I did was fix their mail servers so that they both did not offer open mail relays, and also played nice with ORBZ testing procuedure, and it was Lotus Domino, FYI. It's not like they randomly probe you into oblivion, you request the test and have a reasonable picture of when it will happen, and if you have been digging around the mailserver and fix it right before asking, this isn't a problem. Cases like this should show companies it is worth the money to hire competent systems administrators.

I'd be curious to know

[FreeUser]

Why IBM decided to pursue criminal prosecution rather than releasing a simple bugfix is beyond me.

If it is IBM, they deserve to be bitchslapped. Hard.

However, I'd be very curious to know who is actually doing the suing and issuing the legal threats.

I suspect they are incompetent admins, trying to cover their own incompetency by pointing an accusing finger at the innocent, in this case ORBZ.

Incompetents banding together has to be one of the more sinister forces in our society: far more common than intelligent and neferious conspiracies (which probably can be counted on one hand, if that), far more wide reaching, and far more destructive.

OTOH, for the more paranoid: what are the odds that some SPAMMERs themselves have set up Domino servers with the explicit knowledge of this bug, in order to have legal grounds to threaten and sue one of their most effective opponents out of existence? Actually, I was writing the previous sentence as a joke, but as I type it I don't find the scenerio nearly as unlikely as I first thought.

Not such a great loss as made out

[Zocalo]

I actually stopped using ORBZ some time ago because of the way their database worked in conjunction with the vast amounts of spam coming from DSL lines. Basically if an IP was verified clean then it could not be resubmitted within 30 days, fair enough I guess, but this really fell apart with spam originating from what appeared to be dynamically allocated pools of DSL users. Obviously the same servers were changing IPs, and being reused by the same spammers, but ORBZ's submission engine couldn't deal with this in my numerous attempts to submit active spammers.

I emailed ORBZ over the issue, citing three identical spams all of which were from the same physical server (from a typo in the headers) yet from different IPs, all of which were marked as "Verified clean within the last 30 days". ORBZ' response to this was basically "use multiple RBL servers", which I already was. I stopped using them at all the same day and switched to an alternate RBL server that I could submit spam to for automatic inclusion once verified. Since then I've also set up my own local RBL server, which makes things much easier when you have multiple SMTP servers to administer...

hooorayyyyy

[Ph0bia]

I for one am happy to see this happen and I hope the rest of them all shut down or get shut down also.

The sheer volume of mail that we received as "probes" to test for relays which we have NEVER supported, is SPAM in itself, in my opinion.

Worst of all, I sent repeated requests to people like orbs.org asking to be excluded and they replied with very rude e-mails which contained vulgarities, etc. Real professional guys - glad to see another one bite the dust...

And why not?

[fmaxwell]

Do you have any idea how it would cripple the software industry if they operated under the constant threat of product liability suits?

Oh no! Then we would be under the same, crippling rules as just about every other industry on the planet. Microsoft, IBM, Symantec, et al, would actually need to make a due-diligence effort to fix bugs rather than add new, unnecessary features and eye candy.

Software engineering is not some kind of black magic. It's no different than any other form of complex engineering, be it passenger jets to modern automobiles. To do it right requires care, time, diligence, and testing. If software companies dedicated 1/10 the effort to testing their products that they do to marketing them, 99.99% of problems would be caught before the products ever shipped.

I guess what it comes down to is this: If you are truly a software engineer, then you should embrace time-proven engineering principles and stop hiding behind the "we're just selling a license" cop-out.

So, are the PHP mailing lists spam now???

[bovinewasteproduct]

Ya, I've got a problem with spam. I had subscribed to the PHP mailing lists about 6 months ago, no big deal. Here about 2 weeks ago I no longer had a reason to need them and went to unsubscribe from them. I was told that the server would not take my email because my IP provider was in spews now.

Now mind you, my server (on its own IP address) has NEVER sent out spam (I'm the only one who can send email from it and I've no reason to spam). It seems that some fscking idiot on one of the IPs in CA (my server is in MN) spammed and spews will BH all class C's of the owner no matter where.

So now I get email I don't want and can't get rid of... Should I report the PHP mailing lists to spews as spammers? I'm on a list and I can't contact them to remove me, how is this different from the spammers? Easy to get on, impossiable to get off of...:)

BWP

There is no valid configuration which should do it

[Skapare]

There is NO VALID CONFIGURATION which should result in an infinite loop on the bounceback. If there are ways to configure to avoid it, great. But there shouldn't be a way to actually configure it to do this, and it most certainly should NEVER be the default setup.

When mail is sent to a bad name, and it attempts to bounce back to the apparent sender, it should first recognize that it is connecting to itself. Failing that, the sender of the bounce message should either be a valid box to collect failed bounces for the postmaster to clean out, or it should be a null address which gets discarded. A bounce should never trigger another bounce, either on its delivery, its failure to deliver, or its return. In this, Lotus Notes/Domino is a defective software product and needs to be fixed. I recommend that Ian Gulliver ask his attorney about filing a motion of interpleader to bring IBM into the case as a defendant, if the plaintiff continues to pursue it. If IBM (which just stuck a big ad in my face here on /. spouting off about their security) can't fix this, then they are the ones who should be paying up.