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DoS Assaults Underway Against Spam Blocklists
Hiawatha writes "The same sort of denial of service attacks that drove spam blocklist Osirusoft off the Internet are battering many other blocklist services as well." Apparently spammers aren't going to sit by and let people try to ignore their unwanted pitches.
Apparently spammers aren't going to sit by...
Has anyone stopped to think that maybe it's not spammers who are doing this? I hate spam with a passion, but words cannot describe my pleasure in seeing these blacklists, especially SPEWS, shut down. They are pure evil in their methods, and largely ineffective against spam while causing massive inconvenience for ISPs and legitimate users of the network.
All of these centralized blacklists have made so many enemies in their history that any finger pointing is simply laughable. They have made powerful enemies, including the large ISPs who happen to be the only ones that in a position to stem these attacks. This is not your normal DDOS: it is not only the originators of the DDOS, but the very network itself that wants them destroyed!
Would someone please remind the federal government that DOS attacks are illegal? Anyone want to encourage them to take action against these people? Can they stop playing golf long enough to do their job?
Bad for them. The main reason for creating centralized blocklists was so people who reformed, or who kicked spammers off their blocks, could have their IPs relisted without having to worry that random admins had hardcoded filters into their routers. One central source for listing, one central source for delisting.
If they succeed in negating the value of centralized blocklists, guess what - admins will go back to blacklisting blocks manually. Those IP blocks will become useless once enough people add them to their blocklists, and there won't be any easy way of redeeming them.
Anyone who wants to get internet access better get a clause in their contract guaranteeing that the IPs they get weren't abused by someone in the past, or else they might be getting a useless connection.
This is an act of desparation on the part of spammers that proves the anti-spammers are winning the battle. Fortunately, the next phase of the "war" is moving away from blacklists and focusing on technologies that are user-based and user-specific, such as Bayesian filtering. There is no level of DDoS attack that can stop that battle.
Go to nana-e, and they'll tell you that robots from space run SPEWS, and there's no way to get a hold of them. They start with Class C's, then progress to banning class A's. Some of the crazies who post on nana-e even have the whole country of Brazil banned on their private lists. SPEWS had information too on DNS blackholing (i.e. preventing your users from going to internet sites) and on HTTP blocking. If it was anyone else (the government) who was advocating this, people would be outraged.
Even if you happen to like the blocklists and agree with their methods, it's clearly irresponsible to assume they're being attacked by spammers -- there are a lot of non-spammers who would love to take them out.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yeah, the red tape is a bitch. Here's a list of the red tape:
1. Close your open relays
2. Kick off known spammers
3. Stop list washing system admins who complain about spam
4. Stop making it nearly impossible to submit complaints
-- Will program for bandwidth
As the anti spam officer in a Major ISP in India, I have no problems with blocklists as such. But the people who maintain the blacklists also has a responsibility to correct their mistakes immediatly. They must listen to people who maintain networks and if a machine is wrongly listed they must remove it. The procedure for taking out a machine from blacklists must be documented and verifiable.
We have a large cable network, and there are 3 4 trouble making customers. We do allow people to run their own mail servers. But that also means that some customers misuse it to send spam. It takes us a day or 2 to shut down the spammer, and by then the C bloc will be listed in some black holes.
Now de listing it becomes a major pain if the black holes are not responsive. If the procedures are well documented life of ISPs become much easir.
and no we have not considered denying the freedom of our customers to run their own outgoing mail servers. one or two random spammers cannot force us to deny that freedom to majority of legitimate users in our network.
raj
Sarovar.org Hosting for open source projects in Indi
I'm getting a bit tired of people applauding DOS attacks on blocklists. Many of us run small mail servers for ourselves and/or small companies where EVERYONE who recieves email is in agreement that blocking spam is the right thing to do. When everyone chooses to do this, it's not censorship. Seriously -- the volume of spam is overwhelming, and in a small business there is no one delegate managing email to, and it's consuming precious bandwidth. Spam is the problem, not block lists. No spam, no blocklists, simple as that.
My server has seen as many as 500 spams a day directed at it -- for just two email accounts releated to my business. I had little choice but to elect to use drastic measures and escalate them until the spam became manageable -- and the best defense due to bandwidth issues (we run on just 128K because that's all that's available to us) is blocklists. The problem has been so bad that I maintain an internal block list that uses iptables to simply not route packets from IP blocks (/24) for any email that gets through the first layer of blocklists that sendmail checks.
Osirusoft in particular was very, very useful to me, because they maintained a number of DNS mirrors of other blocklists, so you could pick and choose how drastic you wished your blocking to be. I will miss their service greatly -- and can already notice it as my spam has doubled since it was removed from my sendmail config.
Without blocklists, email for my small business at least would be useless. I know that I've lost business using them, but I'd lose more business/time/money without -- there's no friggin' way I'm going to search through (and accept the bandwidth hit from) five hundred messages to find the few legitimate ones and still have time to get real work done.
This is WAR. Spammers will stoop to any level to get their crap into people's mailboxes, and now the blacklists are giving into their guerilla tactics - I say keep fighting, eventually they will figure out where the attack is coming from, and shut the damn thing down. We must never give up fighting spam, at any cost.
This morning around 6:30AM MST, the spam levels on our work server dropped from ~800 spam/hr to ~35/hr. They'd been hovering at the 800 level for more than a week (most are not actualy spam, but "bounces" from SoBig.F faking our domain as the From address). It's staying right around 35 still about 7 hours later..
Not complaining, but very strange nonetheless!
Ok we have all this wonderful file sharing technology avalible, why not put it to good use. Why not build a distributed black list. One that is shared over an automated file sharing network similar to Napster or Kazaa. DDOS only works with a target, with 100 or more geographically diverse machines sharing it I wish them luck. Make being able to access the list depend on your willingness to share it out too. Of course someone would have to figure out the infrastructure but this would rock.
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