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Spammers Using Hacked Machines as Decoys
avi33 writes "This Wired story shows a disturbing alliance between hackers [sic] and spammers. Interestingly, they blame part of the alliance on market forces, leading some skilled engineers to the dark side for profit's sake. A Polish firm claims to have control of 450,000 Trojaned systems that it uses to mask the IP addresses of its hosted sites. In other words, you could host your Viagra-peddling site with a company that has a stringent no-spam policy, but a DNS lookup will point to a home user's compromised machine. Not quite bulletproof, but certainly ups the ante in the spam war."
Of course if broadband ISPs were to implementing a simple inbound firewall
for every user then they'd eliminate most of these problems overnight:
trojaned machines would be unreachable, worms like CodeRed that scan for
vulnerabilities would be halted.
The few users of broadband who actually need to run an Internet visible
server would then have to contact their ISP for a port to be opened, but
that seems like a small price to pay for cutting off 1000s of machines that
have been hacked.
Naturally, this would cause file steal^H^H^H^Hharing applications to stop
working.
John.
It sounds like they run DNS which "load-balances" requests to the spamvertised sites through zombies set up as open proxies. Since the zombies are scattered throughout all IPs, it makes blocking them hard.
Of course the scumbags know their weak spot is the DNS. Blocking particular domains is easy, and changing the authoritative DNS for a zone takes a while (done that too often). It steps up the spam blacklisting to now require not just refusing mail, but also refusing to talk to certain DNS servers that are known to operate this way. They can move around, but it's harder; I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the current situation.
Damn spammers.
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.
most of them home computers running Windows with high-speed connections.
WHY wasn't ICF turned on by default in XP Home? WHY aren't there pamphlets included with new computers about keeping AV up to date and not opening unknown e-mail attachments? WHY are so many ports in Windows open by default on Home installations? WHY is Microsoft still clinging to the broken "identify executables by extension" mechanism?
We include pamphlets about how not to hurt yourself while you're using your pretty new Gateway PC, but we can't even drop in a fucking 2 page paper about keeping A/V up to date and the danger of executable attachments? Not only that, Microsoft runs on almost all of the Home PCs out there but almost nobody (sorry geeks, we're all still nobodies when we're not on Slashdot) demands any accountability or quality or security from Microsoft?
Fuck it... I'm going to become a goddamn mime.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
My site/service got mentioned in a spam "newsletter" once without my knowledge or consent. I was promptly strung up on spamcop as a business that had advertised in spam -- and my site/service is a spam *fighting* service to begin with!
The point here is there's so much spam with so many variations on the base set of presumed facts, that hair-trigger lawsuits will cause many friendly-fire victims. I doubt the spammer I mentioned above meant to cause me any harm by mentioning me in his "newsletter", but I doubt it would be too hard to find a situation where it's done on purpose -- i *have* been "joe jobbed" several times (used as the reply address on spam) and that gets pretty nasty, too, and presents a similar situation where spammers falsely implicate others. Add in swift and sure legal consequences, and it would be much worse. Even assuming the courts have the ability to determine a false positive defendant when they see one, just think of the expense of doing that.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
Spammers are winning.
I hate to say it, but they are. They're winning because they play dirty, and we can't stoop down to their level. After two weeks of battling an unusual torrent of spam, I'm ready to torture one of the bastards in a week-long live-webcast to serve as a warning to everyone else. It's time to sink below their level, so we can punch them in the nuts without throwing out our backs!
...Before computer use (at least on the Internet) requires a license. I realize that has some very large drawbacks, but at the rate we're going one day the benefits really will outweigh the drawbacks. Do we have to wait until network traffic is 90% spam and viruses? 99%? 100%? A computer can do more damage to the network than a car can do to a highway, and we license driving. Maybe we'll wait until poor network performance starts to kill people by interfering with hospitals and emergency services.
If what they're doing is redirecting to random compromised machines which in turn go to the real site, one method for combatting them is to set up a honeypot of easily-compromised machines and wait for one or more of them to get infected by these loser's trojans. Then firewall logs (or analysis of the trojan) will reveal the real addresses being relayed.
Shouldn't we be monitoring spam anyway, building a list of source IPs, and notifying the ISPs responsible for those IPs to pass along a message to their customers to either a) stop sending spam or b) fix the holes in their machines, or c) they will be cut off from the 'net...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
www.eFax.com are spammers