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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!
So when do we get to launch our DDoS against the spammers again?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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?
Althought he presents a valid arguement, WE DONT WANT TO HEAR THAT!
Apparently spammers aren't going to sit by and let people try to ignore their unwanted pitches.Too bad my users and I are behind a trained spamassassin, then, eh?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Of course it probably is spammers, but it wouldn't suprise me if some people who've had themselves blacklisted unfairly would like to ddos some blacklist servers into the beyond.
Personally I don't believe blacklists are the way to go, I think simply intelligent filtering should be installed wherever possible, and eventually spam will die out. I know spammers are smart and work their way around all sorts of blocks, but so are we, and there's a lot more of us than there are of them.
ObDisc:Don't bother flaming me about "collateral damage" or any of that crap, since I'm not the one ddosing the servers, and I've yet to find myself blacklisted, so I'm not interested.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Earlier this week when people talked about the writer of SoBig leasing his virus network for spamming many people said spammers wouldn't want to be involved with virii/attacks. I think the DOSing of black list sites pretty much shows that the people sending spam have little moral problem with invading your computer to break the law.
Why don't we just offer all the main spammers a free seminar on some small island in the south pacific or somewhere where no one will care, then when they all get there..
:)
NUKE IT!!!
Problem solved
K Man
what makes you think its spammers? there a plenty of legitimate email users with a beef against these fascists--me, for one. i had a domain on a subnet that's entirely blocked despite the fact that i don't have open relays nor have i ever done any kind of spamming. several of my clients within larger corporate structures couldn't receive email from me because some PHB read in DildoCTO Quarterly that these lists can stop spam--never mind the fact that they can stop any kind of legitimate email use as well. There were a LOT of times i'd wished i had had the wherewithal to undertake something like this; spammers or not, i applaud the culprits.
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.
Everyone appears to want to direct mod power today, so why not?
I'm not too disappointed to hear of these new attacks. Conspiracy theories and the like aside, I'd rather have the responsibility for SPAM-blocking placed on the client side.
Damnit, if I want a larger penis, then I should be able to read SPAM directed towards that. That being said, I'd much prefer if these SPAM services were forced to be opt-in.
Unfortunately, client-side filtering doesn't adequately address the massive amounts of bandwidth consumed by SPAM operations. Nonetheless, the idea that an autonymous corporation/whatever can decide what is valid e-mail for ME is just as offensive, in my opinion, as e-mail advertising product/scam/idea X.
Peas,
j
Because you can reject mail at the SMTP level. I typically get about 70 emails a day to my own server. About 40-50 get denied by a DNS based filter on qmail (rblsmtpd). Which means on average, only 25 get through to Spamassassin, where another 15-20 are deleted due to high spam thresholds. Then I get about 5-8 real emails, and maybe 1 or 2 spams that make it through (which Mozilla mail promptly eats as spam).
If I had to burn CPU to Bayes-classify all mails, it would bog me down more than I am now (running on Linux on an old PC).
DNS based BL is useful because it doesn't even let it in the door.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
From the article: In a technique called a "distributed denial of service attack," vandals exploit security flaws to plant programs, called "Trojan arses," on thousands of Internet-connected computers. They then order the Trojan arse programs to spew useless data at a targeted machine.
The mental image of a bunch of Greek soldiers pouring from the sphincter of a huge, wooden butt is just too funny for words.
~Philly
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.
the internet has become self-aware.. these aren't trojans and virii that we see.. (well, they are, but) we're seeing the Internot wake up. It's practicing by attacking blacklists.. since they prevent full unfettered emailing. Network Packets have become the flowing nuerons of it's killer Internett brain.. all these random SoBigs and Slammer.Dongs are multiplying to the point where sentient behaviour must emerge!!!!
HAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA@@@@#!!  ; you beloNG TO THE INTERRRNOTT@@!!
Maybe this is the SoBig.F zombies at work. They have awakened from their "sleeper cells". There was a rummor that they were going to be used by spammers -- but not in this way.
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
I know it sounds heartless, but as a group, blacklists are becoming less-useful by the minute.
If they were all to disappear today, it would only speed the adoption of much more valuable tools against spam, namely bayesian-type filters that are far more effective.
This is the silliest thing I ever expected to read in a spam story...
pamcop's Haight theorizes that the increasingly sophisticated attacks suggest a link with organized crime, but admits he hasn't a shred of evidence.
Anyone else have a wilder guess?
Yes. It's Aliens launching a denial of service attack in advance of their assimilation of the human race. This is clear and obvious to the most casual observer, although I don't have a shred of evidence to support this notion.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Has there ever been studies on who responds to spam, and why?
I can easily see web content filtering going the same way eventually.
People need to understand two reasons why they get spam and DDOS attacks:
1. The backbone providers make money based on bandwidth consumption. They don't care whether the traffic is legitimate or not. It's in their financial interest to not take action against DOS/DDOS attacks and they don't. Many top-level providers will not even intervene unless a lower-level ISP's pipes are completely saturated, even if they complain about a DOS attack.
It would be so easy for the backbone providers to implement temporary blocking of DDOS attacks. These types of attacks are identifiable and the whole procedure could be automated and authenticated, but the top-level ISPs make money off spam and illegal DOS/DDOS activity. People need to petition the backbones to start taking responsibility and implmenting measures to shut down networks that have rogue systems consuming illegitimate bandwidth.
2. The local and federal governments do not effectively (if at all) enforce the plethora of existing computer tampering/break in/attack laws that are already on the books. These attacks CAN be tracked. The law enforcement agencies are either ignorant, unmotivated or unwilling to take action.
No new laws are needed. There are plenty of existing laws on the books right now to justify criminal prosecution of these attackers, which don't merely attack relay blacklists, but every other network along the way, making everyone suffer, including systems that don't use blacklists.
We need to hold the proper people accountable for not using the existing legal system to stop this; we need to hold the top-level providers responsible for allowing a majority of the traffic they bill their clients for to be unauthorized and illegitimate.
Imagine if 70% of the time you picked up your telephone someone else was using it? This is what's happening with Internet 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.
I took over an SMTP server that was an open relay. Spam had been relayed, so the server was blacklisted. I secured the server, contacted the various blacklists, and the server was removed from the blacklists. I had no problem with any of the blacklists, and had no problem getting the server removed. Of course I was polite, and I went through the appropriate channels...
The volume of spam is sufficient without removing the blacklists.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
We use Spam Assasin on Sendmail. We have Sendmail configured so that when a message is positively identified as spam, we automatically update our local access file to blacklist the entire class C of the relay host.
I have been watching this closely for several weeks. Originally, I thought there would be trouble -- surely we would nail some legitimate networks and have to unblock them. But NOOOOO! Every day we reject more and more via the local blacklist and it's always the evildoers. I don't think anyone needs a DNS-based blacklist, all you have to do is harvest the power of the spam data you already have.
I think this is cool. An epic battle between good and evil rages on the Internet. It's sort of like a Lord of the Rings for geeks. Oh wait, Lord of the Rings is for geeks.