Slashdot Mirror
AOL Blocking Spammers' Web Sites
Nuclear Elephant writes "According to this article, AOL has decided to take a fresh approach to fighting spam and is now blocking the spammer's web address. The philosophy is, if the customers can't visit spammers sites, spammers will not be able to make any money. On a side note, I suggested this concept about six months ago but nobody thought ISPs would adopt it. Now perhaps we can get a group like NANOG interested in sponsoring a blacklist for spammer addresses?"
I don't know, whether this is such a brilliant idea - if this gets widely adopted it can't be long before some idiot will get the idea of paying for a spam to "advertise" one of his competitors just to get HIS site blocked...
I see loads of abuse potential here... While AOL might be smart enough not to block sites like microsoft.com or ebay.com if they showed up in a spam, it could be a knock-out blow to relatively
small and medium (and hence little known) companies on the web.
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From: baduser@aol.com
To: gooduser@aol.com
Subject: Look At My Porn
Come look at my naked (sister|mother|wife|daughter) on her web cam doing all kinds of nasty things.
http://www.sco.com
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AOL , making DoS even easier.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I've been doing this for the past year. Every so often I get a call from a user that needs to get to a sight that is associated with a spammer. For example, a local television station's site is hosted on the same machine as a spammer's site. I got calls from users wanting to visit that station's site so I had to unblock it. This is a never-ending job since spammers many time host their "web sites" on virus-infected broadband home PCs. Since I only have to work with 1000 or so users, it's not a big deal. If I had billions like AOL. Gads. I'd rather not think about it. And that's not taking into account those people that truly want to visit the spammer's sites. Who is AOL to deny them the ability to go to the websites they want.
There are just too many pitfalls in this. I don't think all large ISPs will go this route.
But why is the rum gone?
It would be better if instead of completely blocking the page, it re-directed to a page saying that this site is implicated in spamming, but with a link to the real page. Would mimimize impact to falsly accused sites.
One, two, three, even four errors in that email! No exclemation points, no use of the _word_ "u" (like "c u therr". I mean, come on you even capitalized the first letter, what kind of AOL user would do that?? Really, you should really look into improving your writing techneques.
The company I'm working for provides free web service ( http://www.skymail.fr ).
:
This kind of service frequently gets abused by spammers. Two they abuse it
1) they open an account, just to have a valid address in order to bypass basic spam filters. Then, they send their spam through other servers using this address as the sender.
2) they use scripts to send spam through the service, as any regular user would. This is extremely annoying.
For 1) we publish SPF for all domains we send mail from. Now, it's up to people to enable SPF on their mail servers.
For 2) we filter _all_ packets coming from China, Korea, Nigeria and addresses listed in Spews and Spamhaus databases. That's about 13000+ filtered networks. Thanks to OpenBSD packet filter, it's trivial to set up and it doesn't introduce any slowdown.
{{.sig}}
These are the same concerns people are having with FFB (Filters that Fight Back) which are capable of creating massive DoS's against a spammer, but don't really affect anyone else. I think blocking is certainly a step in the right direction, as it conserves bandwidth rather than consume it. AOL will definitely have to keep on their toes to make sure a legitimate website isn't blocked. Some of this can be automated, though - every time it thinks about blocking a website, crawl the site and perform the same type of language classification on it that you would a spam. The website should be even spammier than the email in most cases, or at least provide enough information to classify it as a spammy website. If it doesn't, throw up a red flag and let someone manually review it (or just drop it completely). The great thing about this function is that it not only blocks the spammer's method of contact, but it also makes it much more difficult for a spammer to move around. It's easy to use a different IP to send the spams, but to change your website every day or two is a bit more time consuming, and hopefully will exhaust spammers.
I've got mixed feelings about that.
First of all, are all spammers bad? I mean, there ARE some people that buy crap advertised in spam. And is it all bad, or a ripoff? There was an link on Fark a week ago to an article about some guy that actually looks forwards to receiving spam, and had bought a lot of things from spam mails. Weird things, like a carpet cleaner, but things.
On the other hand, do people want AOL to shelter them from the web, from the real world? I can't mail some friends on another ISP because their ISP has blacklisted Roadrunner Email. We already have a government 'sheltering' us from things, such as the real truth behind assassinations, aliens, and the disappearance of Elvis.
Finally, the more things AOL blocks, the more reason for people to take the red pill, wake up to the monopoly, and get on a real ISP. Then those stupid CDs will stop showing up in my mailbox.
I want to see the web, the whole web, the whole glorious ugly sex-ridden spam-filled seething mass of crap, and naught else.
I have commented several toimes about a need for providers of internet services to take more care of their customers
AOL is a family ISP - most techies wouldn't use it as it doesn't provide what we want, but all those kids surfing on it deserve to be protected from the people who target them with spam
It's been demonstrated over and over that there are enough people out there willing to buy from spammers to make it a highly profitable industry, but that most of those profits come from taking payment by fraud and never supplying the goods
I would not use an ISP that did this, but the marvel of free will means I don't have to. For AOL's target market (largely clueless and wanting an all-in-one service to supply services and protect them) this is the right action.
One final recommendation to AOL
Please supply the latest Windows service pack and the latest Internet Explorer update patches on your CDs and make them a prerequisite to going online. Microsoft would love you to do this, techies would love it too and it would close down a lot of spam relays by closing the holes.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Why not build this capability into browsers? Follow the cookies handling model.
Make it optional, stick it in "preferences", stock it with an initial list of spam sites, and give the user the ability to add additional sites, delete sites, and select/deselect the block.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Instead of simply blocking the connection, AOL could redirect the visitor to a special error page, explaining that the page was blocked for spam reasons and offering an override if the user really wants to see it.
After reading through a page explaining that it is a spam site and that the user might be tracked and harrassed further by those companies for giving them a visit, I'm sure most of them would not click through.
Those masochists looking forward to buying spam and actively supporting these scum could just click "Yes, I really want to see this page" and everyone would be happy. Right?
Let's all just block AOL. Eliminating all of the stupid users that "support" the spammers. That should solve the problem (and many others), quite fast.
This is real funny. I've been trying to install some new sendmail milter programs on my mail server in an attempt to cut down on the amount of spam I receive. As a result, I've been taking a closer look at my mail logs.
I'm getting a lot of mail addressed to accounts that don't exist from systems with names like omr-m14.mx.aol.com. Are these legitimate MTAs or open relays?
If AOL wants to cut down on SPAM, they should start with what gets sent by their servers.
It doesn't take a lot of foresight to imagine the day when the political interests can persuade AOL to block other "undesirable" sites. Technically, it's not censorship because AOL has supposedly done it voluntarily; just like Clear Channel has "voluntarily" removed Howard Stern from their radion stations.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Agreed, this is a clear conflict of interest. Even though I could legally and technically block HTTP traffic between spammer websites and our university network, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing so, precisely because those most likely to complain about it would not be the spammers (or those unfortunate enough to share their web server with a spammer), but rather my own colleagues. And, they would complain to me, rather than to the spammer's ISP.
I'm all for public blacklists, and I keep using those to protect my own mailboxes from inbound junk. If somebody wants to send me mail, I'm justified in asking that person not to pay money to (or otherwise support) the ISP of a spammer. Likewise if they want to access my web pages, though I haven't implemented a blacklist check for those yet.
However, when I prevent my friends and colleagues from viewing somebody else's website just because that website shares hardware with a spammer, things are getting real tricky, because I'm interfering with traffic that doesn't necessarily benefit the spammer or his ISP anyway, and the only ones hurt by it are my friends and colleagues. This is clearly not desirable.
I admit that it makes a little more sense for AOL to do this, given their millions of users who supposedly don't know what's in their own best interest, but I wouldn't want to be a customer of such a company, nor would I want to work for it.
I even emailed Carl Hutzler, Director of Anti-spam at AOL, and he hasn't returned my emails or my calls. The same goes for the hundreds of thousands of spams we get from *.verizon.net, comcast.net, voyager.net, compaq.com, and others. Clearly people inside the business infrastructure have infected systems propagating spam on the weekends, using the corporate bandwidth to do it.
At this point, this is what I do:
So far, the more I block, the faster the spam comes in, and the more I block, ad nauseum.
Here is today's counts. At 5:30am, this was 164 hosts, and now it is 109 more than that.
Spam is definately getting worse, as more and more machines are hijacked for the purposes of propagating it, with these trojans.
The more I block, the more incoming spam we get.