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Spanish Internet Provider's SMTP traffic Blocked
Andrew D Kirch writes "After being barraged by spam and 419 scams from Rima-TDE and telefonica.es [translated], the AHBL has announced that all of Spain's national ISP's e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service. One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?"
This is crazy, blocking an entire country because of spam - while I can appreciate the 'irritation' of receiving spam, the dis-service imposed by this massive block will greatly outweigh the 'service' it's supposed to perform.
It's like back in school, when the entire class would be put into detention because of the actions of one person, it was a pathetic method then and it's a pathetic method now. Ultimately, it comes down to the teacher/blocker being lazy and hoping that such drastic measures will induce the 'masses' to seek out and obliterate the offending party. I never saw such 'action' succeed at school, I doubt we'll see much happen from this either (apart from iritate a lot of people).
*disclaimer: school was more than half a lifetime ago - so perhaps my brain is rusty by now.
Bad luck to those ligitimate ISP's out there that get brought down by a few big National ISP's.
Blanket measures like this are wrong. Target the individual ISP's that are known bad.
not so much a bandaid as a trust metric. It's the equivalent of saying "I am incapable of doing this research, however I will trust persons x y and z to do it, until I say otherwise, I still retain control of my server because I can revoke that trust at any time". However your comment is quite valid, some of them are "self appointed dimwits"
Sounds like the post-9/11 mentality. You know, that "I don't care what you have to do, do SOMETHING!" mentality.
Look where that got us, eh?
This is amazing really.
All the democratizing functions, promises of free education, free dispersion of information, increased international communication and understanding..... all these things that the internet promised is being brought to it's knees because of penis enlargements, nigerian fraudsters, and greedy marketers all wanting to make a buck!
Don't mod this funny! It's NOT!
(Actually, now that I think of it, TV suffered the same fate. Originally touted as an educational resource, it turned into the junk box it is today. It's just history repeating.)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This is the same reason why organizations such as Spews.org, when leveraging their clout correctly, can get things fixed: they get the regular end users after the ISP to fix their problems. Spain now can't email a LOT of places. Spain. Not just TDE customers, but ALL people there. Now, all of TDE will be complaining to TDE, along with TDE's partners. Their competitors. Heck, maybe the government. They'll clean up their act, or else. If they don't, that's fine too, if they don't want to email anyone.
Remember that no one on the Internet is obligated to accept traffic from anyone. Be it email or otherwise. If I choose to block you from mailing me via my website, or from even viewing my site--or if I decide this of your entire country--that is my decision. My IP address(es), my mailbox, my rules. ISPs flaunt my wishes by spamming me, and they get dropped.
So, again, why is this bad if it forces them under huge pressure to fix their issues?
Dude, where's my packet?
e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service
Nope, only *you* can block email to *your* server.
Uh... the site says:
Blackholes.us does not list spammers, spam supporters or vulnerable hosts at the present time. These lists are meant to contain all known networks assigned or allocated to the respective provider or organizations within the respective country. Lists are created for research purposes, primarily, and are made public for any use others see fit.
Really, all they're giving you is a list of IPs assosicated with the named nation or company. If you were to use all of those blacklists at once, you will have blocked out nearly every major hosting firm in the USA, and a good chunk of the world. Not just the spammers, but everything within those ranges. This is definitely a "We can't find the criminals, so we're nuking the town!" defense plan.
These lists are valuable if you want to lock out an entire provider... but realize that you're going to throw out a lot of legitimate servers in your quest to block a few Spammers. Unless you're sure you're never going to have customers in Mexico, don't throw out all of Mexico's IP space in one swipe.
Also, beware that these lists don't sort datacenters from customers. EV1's IP space for example is mostly servers, but they do operate a regional ISP as well. Block that whole range, and some dial-up customers might try to reach you and fail.
Think before you block...
Nonsense, the government has no say in what policies a private Spanish company implements.
This is seen as a technical issue for the company to resolve.
I believe Poor Richard's Almanac (written by Benjamin Franklin) which went something like this:
When solving a problem it is common to take a method and try it. When it fails, try another. But above all, do something."
That is the point of Blacklists - you should be complaining to your ISP that they are blacklisted. If they are blacklisted, it means they are hosting spammers and this (customers like you putting pressure on them) is the only way to get them to clean up their act.
At least the system would government controlled and thus a lesser evil than the tyranny of vigilante groups like SPEWS.
Boy you are a True Believer(tm) aren't you!?!
Name one thing the Government (any government) does well?
As For SPEWS and others, their actions are based on actual monitored events (spam) and not the whim of some dictator or someone doing a favor for a bribe.
Further, the use of these BlackLists is TOTALLY voluntary. You don't have to use them. Run your own MTA.
But let the government get ahold of this and no one will speak out of turn.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Personally, I get anywhere between one thousand and one hundred thousand spams a week directed at my domain from some asshat in Brazil. They come addressed to user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com, etc., in alphabetical order. Tens of thousands of them. And that's just the Brazilian stuff. That doesn't include the mortgage ads, 419 scams, porn ads, and advertisements that will help me make my wife's penis larger.
Since I'm the only person who uses my domain, and I don't read Portuguese anyway, these are nothing but a drain on my bandwidth and resources, even if I were inclined to buy penis enlargement cream for my wife.
And since I use a hosting service I can't implement a connection-level block because I don't have root on the box. Implementing SpamAssassin on the hosting server brings their box to its knees (I know because I've done it and they shut down my account); instead, I have to dedicate one of my own boxes to scanning all this shit -after- downloading it. My box does virtually nothing else.
And since my domain is my last name, I can't exactly change it easily.
SMTP is broken. It has outlived its usefulness, and it is past time for it to die. Born in an era when the internet was a far safer place, patches and scanning placed on top of it to stop spam do nothing to put the burden of sending mail where it belongs: on the sender. While tools like SpamAssassin, SpamBouncer and RBLs help us to avoid seeing the crap in our inboxes, they remain kludges that still eat up our processor time, bandwidth, infrastructure and money.
But all my work in call centers has taught me that stupid people will always exist, and that some of them can never be taught to behave properly. This means that any schmuck with enough money and enough time and some basic Google literacy can set up a broken copy of $YOUR_FAVORITE_SMTPD on $YOUR_FAVORITE_OS and become the latest spew.
Proposals exist (Dr. Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 is one of several) to shift the burden of storage and processing from the receiver to the sender. All well and good, but nobody's bothered writing a bunch of cross-platform implementations that everybody will actually switch to, and that Microsoft won't be able to embrace and extend.
So where does that leave us mere mortals, except to use the hypersonic planet-smashing axe to kill the maggot-laying fly?
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Contrary to what many people seem to think here, the announcement doesn't say thay'll block the whole country. That measure would be draconian, along the line of nuking a city to quench a major disturbance.
Instead, they say (correctly) that they are blocking the offending IDE, which "is the govt run ISP of Spain" so it can be expected that this ISP provider is a major provider, and many people will be affected. I believe that. Telefonica was, until a few years ago, _the one and only_ telephone communications provider of Spain. It is BIG.
This is unfortunate, but _if_ this provider really is such a non-cooperative major source of spam and hack attacks, then I can't blame them for blocking it, much as it pains me.
Salutaciones, JCAB
Ideally, people would complain to their ISP. But, society is hardly an ideal...
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:x That's spam I wouldn't mind receiving it means I could ring up the ISP and warn them that if 3 days later the ISP still finds itself listed, I'd take my business elsewhere - and find a decent alternative in the mean time, rather than being caught off-guard.
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Somebody robs a bank and flees.
The cops don't know where he is, but know that he can't have fled beyond 5 blocks.
The cops cordon off those 5 blocks.
Everybody within can't leave, everybody outside can't get in.
Does society, in general, get pissed wtih
A. The bankrobber, for robbing the bank, making this a likely necessity
B. The police, for preventing people from going where they want
Answer : B
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A local TV transmitter gets notice from a commercial network that the commercial network will no longer pay the transmitter to be aired. They'll have to put them on the air for free.
The local TV transmitter gives them the finger and pulls them off the air.
Delicate issue : the commercial network carries soap operas that are hugely popular within the local region.
Does society typically blame
A. The commercial network for using their show's/shows' popularity to try and strong-arm the local transmitter for a better deal
B. The local transmitter for making it impossible to watch their favorite show
Answer : B. Real story where I'm from, and people ended up getting TV dishes en-masse.
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Same thing with this...
Do you really think all those Spanish people are going to blame their ISP for hosting (known) spammers once they get word/realize that their mails out to the world are bouncing/getting eaten ?
Of course not. They're going to say "wtf. stupid blacklists - that e-mail has to be there today, and that blacklisting of my ISP is the reason it can't. I guess I'll have to hotmail it. *expletive*"
That's how cause and effect is going...
effect : ISP is blacklisted
cause : ISP hosts spammers
NOT the legitimate people's problem!
at least, until...
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : blacklists
Therefore - blame the blacklists!
you see, there is no
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : ISP hosts spammers
relationship to most of society, so they're not about to blame the spammers.
And as much as I disagree with that stance, and would poke at my ISP to see if they can get off the blacklists a.s.a.p., I can't say that I blame users who point at the blacklists instead.
Maybe if blacklists could warn ISPs' users 3 days in advance. Maybe... mass e-mail them
Gandi.net just happens to be a cheap registrar. I bought a domain there, and their service is perfect AND cheap. Now your idea is just as plain stupid as blacklisting an entire country.
Note also that with a few simple scripts blocking by registrar should be fairly easy.
Then you'll know what to do. Complain to your ISP till they take action,
and get rid of the bad people/spammers.
And, gather up more people to complain.
your paper also doesn't really provide any emphasis or responsibility on ISP's to police their traffic, therefore it's more or less functionally useless at stopping spam. The best way to stop spam is to deny access to our mail servers from ISP's harboring spammers.
Funny, that reminds me of how rich people talk about poor people --- too bad for them, they shouldn't "associate" those people or live in those spammy countries, surely people in Brazil have the power to force their ISP to stop spammers the same way people in the US were able to force Comcast to tell them exactly what the monthly bandwidth caps are. Oh, well, let them eat cake, change ISPs, complain to your ISP, its not SPEWS, they just create a list and then they wash their hands of it.
Elitist fuck, many people have as much power to switch ISPs as you do to make SBC stop using PPPoE. If you were in a situation where you were fucked as collateral damage by SPEWS or the war on drugs or the war for big oil or the war against terrorist hackers, then you wouldn't be so flip.
Regular people don't have power - ISPs, spammers and SPEWS (in these types of situations) have the power and regular people are just fucked as usual.
SPEWS - "We try to pressure ISPs into stopping spammers by drawing innocent parties into the line of fire and having them howl like tortured cats. We call it 'Coercive Recruitment' but we feel good about recruiting them because our cause is just" and as we know from history, when people are recruited against their will to fight for a cause they are always the better for it...
It's a little-known (in the U.S.) fact that people in other countries speak languages other than English.
For instance, I live in France, and my mail provider in the U.S. uses a whole bunch of these predominantly U.S.-based blacklists. Much of the mail sent via French ISPs by my friends is blocked because just once, perhaps seven or eight months ago, someone managed to send some spam from an account with those ISPs before having their account closed. Those ISPs are doomed to remain on the blacklists forever because, although the problem has been solved (open relays closed, AUP tightened up and closely followed) their technical staff can't get off the black hole lists because the lists' documentation and (in the case of one list) ransom demands are in American English. To a non-U.S. ISP, email from a black hole list operator looks very much like Korean or Brazilian spam must do to you: gibberish.
I've written to a few of these ISPs, explaining the problem and translating some of the information for them, but I don't have time to compensate for the weaknesses of two countries' education systems single-handedly.
If you want someone to do something for you (whether it be to fix the leak in a hotel room or to secure an open mail relay in a network) then it helps to talk to them in their language, rather than shouting at them louder and louder in your own.
Which is exatly why reputable spam filters (Spamassassin, etc) only use a positive match on a blacklist to increase your 'spam likelyhood' score. Ditto, as the primary mx for a dozen or so domains, I *NEVER* block or delete email based upon it's spam scorecard or whether the sending server is in a 'blacklist'.
If it goes past a certain threshold (in my case, an SA score of 5 or greater) my server will prepend ****SPAM**** to the subject line. What you choose to have your mail client do with such mail, based upon the subject line match as well as whether the sender is in your adress book, etc. is 100% your decision.
In my personal case, I have a couple of sender domains, namely yahoogroups.com that while not spam are *sometimes* misflagged as such... Not surprising since they are mass-emailed messages that *DO* have advertising. My mail filters move these into a seperate folder before procsssing '***SPAM****" messages.
Spam is a bitch and I hate it as much as the next admin. Deleting or blocking said email is the *wrong* choice.
I quite agree Telefonica.es are an insuferable source of spam (much of the 419 spam I get is relayed through there, as you say). Telefonica is in fact the single largest source of all the spam in my mailbox and I have tried to get them to take notice for years. I welcome this action with open arms.
Telefonica.es administrators are simply utterly incompetant and have been for years - they don't care one hoot, maybe now their own sence of self preservation will take over (though it's sad that it has to go this far before there is any hope of them taking action).
There was a large degree of debate when they first joined the European Union that less wealthly nations such Spain and Portugal joining would upset the balance, so they were 'eased in' thanks to legislation allowing for a transition period. Now, they are economicaly fully integrated, but cultural issues still remain. I think their behavior in this reguard is glaring example of the level of sophistication and competance in a highly technical field not being up to par.
Spain, South America, Africa and the less developed parts of Asia are main sources of spam (at least, the spam I receive). While South America, Africa and Asia all have understandable economic reasons for being sources of such abuse, the Spanish ought to be able to keep order and it's a damning indictment of their abilites that they have been unable to for so many years. What's even more depressing is I predict that we see a new influx of spam from the Eastern European nations now joining the EU in the not-too-distant future.
I say, filter everything. Stop the SMTP protocol and hey presto, no spam. Personally, I would make it unlawful to have the 25 port open.
Blacklists like this are the nazi way to fighting spam. Admins (and I'am an admin, too) use their godly powers to crash those spammers -- and just a few nearby unlucky innocent people. I have nothing against personal blacklists, but huge public lists are definitely not the way to go and this is exactly the example why.
Every anti spam tool should be measured in the terms of false positives and false negatives. Well, no false negatives this time, but look at the huge false positive count. And as Paul Graham said:
"False positives are innocent emails that get mistakenly identified as spams. For most users, missing legitimate email is an order of magnitude worse than receiving spam, so a filter that yields false positives is like an acne cure that carries a risk of death to the patient."
I'm a european and the occasional relayed-by-spain spam message doesn't even make the 95% that is relayed by US based machines.
Don't assume, measure, balance, and do something about your own country's companies. It could be your neighbour.
And that guy 3 postings up has a valid point: 80% of all spam topics are US centric. I should blacklist all US IP numbers for that. The US is capitally guilty of keeping spam in place, either by the largest DEMAND (companies and customers), or by non-conclusive legislation.
The equivalents exist IRL too.
I live in a place where I have difficulty finding a cab. If I call for one on the phone, they tell me to be out in the street waving for the cab, or they will drive past without stopping in the area. I never go out on a Friday or Saturday night without a bulletproof vest, and I'm always armed with at least one combat knife - often several.
This is where you live online. This is why people won't come to your place to deliver pizza. Or SMTP, or any other service.
Bad troll. The EC was formed in 1957 and Spain joined in 1986, at the same time as Portugal.
We only block based on a few external lists (ORDB, SpamCop, Blitzed Proxy), and then, not unconditionally. 90% of our blocks are done by internally generated lists, because we do have to receive mail from compromised sources at times... our business customers have clients in countries that are notorious for spamming, and even on ISPs that are bad.
That said, we do not accept any mail on the first pass from a large number of subnets, varying in size from /24 up to /8's, and a growing number of European subnets are on that list - not just Spanish ones. Mail from these subnets is "soft-bounced" (given a 451 error code) until it can be reviewed for legitimacy. And anything that doesn't have at least 1 retry is judged to be a proxy-based spam attempt.
Now, I will check bounces against some of the more agressive lists in deciding whether to make exceptions for these "soft bounces", but the final authority is a check with the customer on anything questionable. A million-customer ISP can't do that; that's one of our advantages...
This is just egocentric crap! We are frequently blocked because our netblock is a source of spam. The ultimate provider is controlled by a branch of the Chinese government. Like most people here, we have no choice, or influence over our ISP. The logic in the post is therefore fatally flawed. Be aware, that the fastest growing power in IT and related is China. Do you really want to exclude that potential source of business enquiry? If so, it is not surprising that you are exporting your jobs to India and China. Ironically, 99% of the spam I receive is for products whose ultimate source is the USA.
What determine "who have no business sending smtp"? virus or trojan ridden computers
That's not an unreasonable start for a definition. If your the webmaster of example.com, and your ads are coming through an smtp server in example.com's domain, your going to be careful not to get your domain blacklisted. Most hosting provider's have some way of alowing you to compose Email on your local machine, and sending through your hosted domain. Even if they don't, a perl or asp script on your websever can do the trick real easy.
Anyone with the knowhow that is paying for an internet conection deserves the right to use that internet conection as they see fit. No you don't, you have the rights given in your ISP's Terms of Service. And I'd bet that all of those rights are subject to change without prior notification. If you don't like the service provided by your ISP, simply find one who does. You can even look into getting a raw pipe for yourself, then you can deal with all of an ISP's headaches.
The Bottom line is an Internet cafe that doesn't block out-going port 25 is just an open-relay that requires your physical presence.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds