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On The Trail Of Super-Zonda
Dynamoo writes "BBC Radio 4 has been on the trail of the notorious Super-Zonda spammers and crackers, according to this article. Super-Zonda's trick is to find insecure hosts and pressgang them into webservers for mail order brides, viagra and other spam favorites. In this case a server is traced back to a hacked machine at a major international airline.
The BBC investigate some of the people allegedly behind the spam in an investigation starting on the Spamhaus houseboat in London and ending in the Netherlands via Moscow. The BBC point the finger at Martijn Bevelander of MegaProvider as being not the innocent party he seems. The BBC provide some evidence to back this up, and are not known for rash accusations."
The trick they use, as I understand it, is to rig their DNS servers to respond differently based on the IP address querying the spammed domains. The DNS responds with the address of an open HTTP proxy normally, and when the open HTTP proxy does the lookup, it gets a different address - the spammer's webserver. That webserver then only responds to those open proxies. The moral of the story is to be more careful when you put any proxy on the internet.
Beer wants to be free
General Geekery
Second, it appears that Super-Zonda just recently moved the actual host (well, it too was a proxy) to CyberAngels (they had been on servepath.com for a long time, then ev1 [I think it was] for a weekend, then
The spammer uses network scanning tools to find an open web proxy. A system where, with the proxy located at {PROXY_IP} as its IP address,
telnet {PROXY_IP} 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nytimes.com
gets the front page of the NY Times.
He then does the following.
He uses something like the following:
telnet {PROXY_IP} 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: [a_hostname_of_his_own]
and looks at his nameserver's records to see whence came a request to resolve his hostname. Now he knows the location of the nameserver/resolver used by the open proxy. He does this a few times (the proxy may use several nameservers - just as in configuring your windows system for the 'net, you enter two nameservers in the settings). He also checks at his web server to see whence comes the connection (the proxy may or may not make its outgoing connections using the same IP address).
Now he sets his nameserver to do the following:
1: It responds to requests to resolve his spam site which come from the nameserver(s) used by the proxy with the correct IP address (of his spam site).
2: It responds to ANYONE else with the IP address of the open web proxy.
He then sets up his web server itself to drop all packets to port 80 (maybe to all other ports as well) EXCEPT packets to his port 80 *which come from the abused proxy*.
The result? Everyone resolves his spamvertized host to the abused, hacked, illegally accessed web proxy and sends HTTP packets thither. That server/proxy attempts to get and serve up the pages by getting the IP address from its resolver which then gets the IP address of the hacker/spammer's actual site and accesses it and gets the page to return to the victim. Even if one happens to guess at the location of the actual spammer's machine, one cannot verify it since it appears dead to anyone except the proxy.
The trick to locating him is to find out what resolver the proxy is using and have your resolver, nslookup or dig in Linux, say, do a lookup, but not via your ISP's nameserver - instead use the proxy's nameserver/resolver. Then you find whence the proxy got what it served up.
[By the way, this is a pro-spam operation and the spammer's site may host some clients' stuff and in some cases, at least, it actually proxies the pages from another site.]
It is not a matter of the spammer "hacking" anything. It is simply his hijacking web servers which serve as proxies but which allow anyone to use them as proxies.
Why "super-zonda"? The names he used for his nameservers were ns1.super-zonda.com, etc. For other spamertized domains he registered different names for the nameservers, but they were located at the same IP addresses/locations.
One of the web servers/open proxies he hijacked was a British Airways travel shop server. He also hijacked a mideast bank web server. A K12 server in Colorado, I think it was. Several in Korea. He would spam for many clients at once, hijacking several web servers (one for every one or two of the hostnames).
The article on the BBC says:
"When Paul and Matt looked up which computer the website was using to host its service, the IP address belonged to British Airways."
Wrong. That was what it appeared to be. The pages were not there.
That site was proxying them.
Administrators can't do anything in cases where management doesn't mind pink spammer money, or where the sales guys are clueless about known spammers.
For plenty of block lists, start at sprews.org and follow the links. Eventually you'll find one of the flavour you want.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm a network engineer for a medium-sized ISP in The Netherlands. Martijn Bevelander has been operating in de dutch ISP world for years now. Previously most people saw him as a huge clown; his daddy (some chief somewhere) seems to always fund his playing in the internetworld while he manages to get all his companies to go broke.
His staff continues to show their good knowledge on the Internet: see this mail where one of his noc monkeys notifies the operators on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange of a new announcement from Bevelander Internet Services: 192.168.0.0/16. Perhaps this was just a sneak preview into the future?
The dutch media have reported on several occasions on him: check this link from Webwereld.
Insiders still laugh on his ignorance regarding security. He used to have his printers wide open connected to the internet, resulting people to send complete black pages to it. Another great story is how he continued to buy new 3com switches after he failed to change the administrators access to them and someone from the outside shutdown't his uplink port. Yeah Martijn, they were all broken.
So far he was just a joke. The troubles started when his company Bevelander Internet Services got broke and he quickly setup a new company called Megaprovider. After most of the customers were transferred, he sold the empty remains to Concepts ICT. Appearantly Megaprovider is not doing to good as well, seeing his Cyberangels adventure.
One of his well-known associates, Joshua Dodds, is known as a true DDoS-kiddo, DoS'ing everyting and everyone who says a bad thing about him on IRCnet. I guess they will never learn...
The channels aimed at British audiences (ie. for those who pay the licence fee) do not carry adverts. These are BBC1, 2, 3, 4, Children's BBC, CBebbies (for toddlers), News 24 and BBC Parliament. Same goes for audio services Radio 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, Asian Network, BBC Cymru (Welsh language), BBC Local Radio etc. These are almost entirely funded by the licence fee.
In the case of advert-free satellite signals these are quite literally "aimed"; the BBC broadcast advert-free from a satellite with tight coverage of the UK mainland with only very minimal bleed into the rest of Europe.
The channels aimed at international audiences (ie. for those who do not pay the licence fee) are funded by a mixture of foriegn office taxpayer's money, adverts and in some cases subscriptions. These include BBC World, BBC Prime and BBC America and are handled by a slightly seperate commerical company called BBC Worldwide and are broadcast on a number of satellites with coverage for most countries.
The international audio stations such as BBC World Service and BBC English By Radio are funded solely by the foreign office (similar to the funding for the Voice of America).
British viewers can also see BBC programming on non-BBC channels with advertising such as S4C (Welsh language), UK Gold (comedy & soap repeats) and UK History (documentary repeats). Some of these channels are entirely funded by advertising, some also have small injections from various government departments such as the Welsh Office, Scottish Office and European Union, in the case of regional language programming such as Welsh or Scots Gaelic. For instance, the popular Welsh soap opera Pobl Y Cum (Valley People) is made by the BBC but broadcast on independent station S4C supported by both advertising and government funding [PDF, Welsh and English].
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com