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Spam is Back With A Vengence
Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before.
In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."
Until the SEC hasn't gone aggresively against one of the most blatant pump-and-dumps. nothing will change.
Last month I installed the FuzzyOCR on my Spamassassin setup it and I can now testify that rare is the image spam that gets through. I wrote a article about it if you want more detail : http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2006/12 /19/fuzzyocr-hits-debian-unstable-and-eradicates-i mage-spam
I'm sorry but your message from articles.slashdot.org was REJECTED because it has been flagged by our system as spam. You may not be the source of the spam, but our servers do not respect SPF flags and therefore accept, process and then bounce almost any old slutty slice of bits that get hucked our way. We blame you, the owner of the spoofed domain.
To get a hard copy of this message please send $1 to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.
Promotional consideration has been provided by the Russian Mob.
These stories are free but worth money.
The problem with punishing the firms advertised is that it is very hard to prove. It could be that they hired an advertising firm which represented itself as legitimate. It could even be that someone spammed in their name to try and damage their reputation.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
In spite of the rise in spam, you can still keep everything but the stray message or two a day hitting your inbox if you configure SpamAssassin well. Get a guide like McDonalds' SpamAssassin and follow the steps for the usual configuration based on examining headers and referring to Razor. Then, take a massive collection of all sorts of spam, from text pump 'n' dump to image spam, and feed it into sa-learn, SpamAssassin's Bayesian training system. A good setup with extensive Bayesian training will cut out almost everything. And it's not too hard. If you can install a Linux distro, you can configure SpamAssassin.
However, this is obviously only to filter spam coming into your own box. When I am travelling, I try to force myself to leave my laptop behind in order to truly relax, but that means that I have to use my e-mail provider's web interface. And when I see that my Inbox has 500 messages after just 36 hours, then I start to understand the grumbling that SMTP is broken and we need a drastically reformed protocol.
Akismet is what a lot of Wordpress users (and many other bloggers) use to prevent comment spam. They've got a pretty neat stats page that shows the volume of spam they have blocked from their creation. They are relatively new, so the fact that the graph trends upwards so quickly also has to do with the fact that their userbase is still growing. But it's unquestionable how large a spike I saw in the end of November and December. Particularly over the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday weekends. I have a personal server in my house that was MELTED by the amount of hits to my dinky little blog. It would go up and then 30 seconds later would be unresponsive and have to be forcefully rebooted. It even killed my D-Link router.
I'm posting AC so slashdot doesn't melt my server again...
Well, spam is a technical issue driven by human nature and social ills, IMHO. So I think it would be good to have the various trade and exchange regulators deal with it, at least somewhat. For example, the SEC or various national/international trade blocs could have a task force which more actively does something about stock spam. For example, company XYZ appears in a spam message in country ABC. If the company originated the spam or paid for it, then they are barred from trading in country ABC for a length of time. If they did *not* originate the spam, then the task forces would track down the originators with assistance from local law enforcement. The overall idea is to remove the incentive to spam.
C|N>K
Obviously this won't work, i just don't know why, or at least not clearly.
There are only a few ISPs that connect at cross-network access points. All other ISP, buy their service from up-level ISPs.
As has been suggested before, why can't every ISP have a policy (start at the top (the access points), and the rules will trickle down) that any ISP sending spam has to turn off access within a few hours or be shut down.
Ultimately, the low-level ISP, who actually connect to the users would be forced to recognize the individual computers sending the spam, and shut down their access. These users can even use a virus cleaning program, or never come back on.
When "innocent" computers are turned off, it really isn't that big of a deal. There are free tools to remove viruses, and i'l bet they will be *happy* to know they're a problem, and how to get better.
At first they would be inundated with calls, but then we'd have a clean inter-network.
And noone can just start a new top-level network, because they would be denied entry to the access point, of which there are only a few.
Seriously, why won't this work?
Have you read my journal today?
Score:1, Redundant
By definition, shouldn't any post about spam be marked redundant?
Anyway, I run a mailserver. What I see is surges of email for whatever happens to be the current scam. Last year it was mostly mortgage offers (Get a cheap, misspelled mortqaq3 today!!!) Spamassassin + RBLs eliminate about 70% of the flood. Image-only email is flagged by spamassassin. Now random text is added to get past the Bayesian filters. The arms race continues.
BTW, if you are the type to send copies of spam to abuse addresses, I advise you to remove identifying info and post it through an anonymous account to avoid retaliation. ISPs tend to forward it to the spammer.
The thing that always bothered me about that skit was that the first two things that the waitress mentioned didn't have spam. Egg and bacon, and Egg Sausage and Bacon.
Maybe I think about this stuff too much.
Technoli
That applies to most guys on Slashdot.
There's an interesting artical at Extreem tech about the wave of spam that hit us last year:7 ,00.asp
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,206027
Most admins were able to find ways to eliminate that eventually: http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=580
but now I notice a new trend. Some spammers are actually putting news headlines in the subject field.
On top of that the black hats are now finding ways to spam emule search results.
Every search you make in Emule will return a fake hit... something like *_using_emule_multimedia_toolbar.exe. If you exectute that program your machine will be infected with a virus.
The volume of spam is definitely up, and most of it is pump and dumps from a very few distinct sources. In December, about 20% of the 30,000 spams I received were for one particular stock.
1 4241
/. articles) want you to believe so you'll buy their products. In general, word salads, obfuscated words and image spam do not defeat state-of-the-art statistical filters.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/21/23
But it is wrong to say that this new spam requires radical new filtering techniques. That's what the spam solution vendors (whose press releases drive these
See, for example, the recent TREC tests: http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/trecspamtrack06
These results show that filters achieve about the same results on 2006 spam as on 2004 spam, and those results are pretty good. Ongoing tests show that the effectiveness of filters is unchanged for 2007. In general, the volume of spam has increased, and spammers have tried various methods of defeating spam filters. But their efforts have not been particularly successful against statistical filters.
I think an interesting study would be to harvest spam,
scan for pump and dump, and buy stock based on verious
factors. If you refined you algorithm perhaps you could get
an application that would buy and sell pump and dump
stock on your behalf, and make money in the process
I would practice with virtual stock at first.
Could an application buy and sell stock without
human intervention?
Don't make your problems my problems!
Well then I know what to do about my pesky competitors, just have some spammers send spam in their name! Problem solved!
So who do you want to monitor everybody's commerical actions? Actually, to know that the person bought a product because of spam, we'd need to monitor them whenever they check their email. Big Brother go!
In the name of Karl Popper, though, I appreciate your proposals.
Why not just block e-mails that contain .gif attachments?
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone One Last Spamhaus Warning Before The End
Who is even dumb enough to make their purchases based on spam mail. I mean, surely everyone must know what spam is by now? How can one be so dense as to trust a completely random, badly worded, illarticulated e-mail full of spelling mistakes from someone you don't know to make informed decisions about what stock they should buy?
It simply makes no sense to me. As long as people remain so completely clueless that they will fall for spam, there will be spam.
Please try to size the punishment to the size of the crime.
I'd settle for ten seconds of jail time and a penny fine per spam. That would (very roughly) approximate treble damages for time wasted. A million spams would yield a 4 month sentence and a $10,000 fine.
Of course, if they sent a billion spams, they might as well get the death penalty, since they wouldn't be getting out in this lifetime.
Also, your American laws don't carry much power over other jurisdictions, and convincing others to share death penalty for something like this would be hard.
The reverse is also the case, of course.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
It happens, but not that often. When they catch one, law enforcement does a dog and pony show and we applaud wildly. But they just keep coming.
Arrests don't seem to happen that often. Do a google for "spammer arrested", and most of the hits are about the Buffalo spammer. He was arrested back in 2003 to much fanfare. However my mailbox is still full of. Maybe there is more than one of them out there?
I'm guessing spammers spam because they know the chance of them being caught is nigh on zero. Yet, this is a criminal racket just like any other criminal racket. If some serious money is put into law enforcement, then spammers might finally get the shakes. Apart from pump-n-dump stocks (get off yer asses SEC), spammers aren't hard to catch. Consider Mortgage spammers. If you reply to a Mortgage spam (I am told) you will later be called by a seemingly unrelated mortgage agency. They have bought your contacts off the spammers. Everything can be traced, and if we have the feds seeded spammers with 1-use-only phone numbers, buying stuff and tracking it just like they do any other illegal contraband, of course they can bust it. Make receiving spammed contact details an offence too: The recipient must be reasonably confident that the leads they received are not spam. Harder to prove, but if there is a reasonable chance of prosecution buyers of spam harvests will become shyer and the market dry up. Lets make it a legal requirement that ISPs have to report spamming users to the feds.
And let's get beyond "fines" for offenders. Fines for any profitable business are merely an operating expense. What really scares company directors is Jail time. This has been used in L.A. to force companies comply with laws they'd otherwise have simply paid out. If a spammer thinks there is a 0.0001% chance of him being caught (and then let off with a warning), they will do it. If they think they probably can't sell their harvest, have a 50% chance of being caught and will definitely go to Jail, they won't!
So why isn't this happening? (1) It's not an issue for politicans. I want to see Obama/Hillary/McCain arguing about Spam!!! and so... (2) The money isn't budgeted for law enforcement. With some Elliot Nesses on Spam, I reckon we can crack this. How do we let the politicians know this is an issue for us?
Just like with the war on drugs, eh? Yeah I see how raising the punishment really helps. No wait. Shit, it doesn't. I guess we're fucked now.
What I think would help is ISPs taking confirmed zombie machines offline. It's done in Sweden by some ISPs, and most people don't seem to have a problem with that.
Not only am I seeing more Spam hitting my inbox.. I am seeing more spam on WordPress Blogs. This is where I am seeing the most problems.
The email server I use tags and filters spam, but the WordPress Blogs are filling up with Spam, plus it is clogging up MySql databases for comment spam that it uses all the processing power up - so the other services on the box as well as the webserver crawl to a slow. Even with other programs such as Akismet marking the comment psots as spam, the problem lies in the database being tied up.
Perhaps the SEC could require stock brokers and other companies issuing penny/OTC/pink sheet stocks to log whoever buys or sells them. There should be a discernible pattern among pump-and-dump traders that the SEC could backtrace to identify the perpetrator. I would imagine the perpetrator would not purchase the stock too far in advance, as market fluctuations during that time could make their scheme fail. They probably buy the stock only a few days or maybe weeks beforehand, and then sell immediately after the spike. Their initial purchase is probably sizable as well, more than your average investor. For most people who never deal with OTC stocks, their privacy is ensured. For those who do choose to deal with these types of stocks, it would be part of the cost of business for dealing in such a risky and crime-ridden market. The SEC needs to figure this one out sooner rather than later...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I can go one better. 1-Charge the $0.01 (or $0.005 or whatever) per piece of email, prepaid.
2-When the email reaches the other end monies are returned to the sender. However, at the recipients discretion the postage return can be stopped.
The end result would hopefully be that spammers pay, optimally through the nose, and compliant users still get to use the system for free or next to free.
1. Satire: Perhaps the most confounding form of humor, note the subtle reference to the discussion embedded in a story about something else. This wasn't flaming slashdot, it was about how spam that appears to originate from your domain (but doesn't) can get you blacklisted by site admins as clueless as the moderators who flagged the parent as flamebait. Here is a good example of satire:
I'm sorry but your message from articles.slashdot.org was REJECTED because it has been flagged by our system as spam. You may not be the source of the spam, but our servers do not respect SPF flags and therefore accept, process and then bounce almost any old slutty slice of bits that get hucked our way. We blame you, the owner of the spoofed domain.For further reading, see the wiki.
2. Obligatory references to The Simpsons:
To get a hard copy of this message please send $1 to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.Hint to poster: Next time, just go with the "overlords" joke.
3. Relevancy: Recent news stories highlight that most spam is coming from botnets under the control of Eastern European and Russian criminal organizations. Had you bothered to read anything on /. about spam prior to moderating just now, you'd probably know this. Hence the following is, in fact, funny:
Promotional consideration has been provided by the Russian Mob.Thank you for moderating today! We hope you enjoyed your crack!
My ISP (www.ntlworld.com) doesn't allow you to use www if your connection has a high amount of outgoing port 25 action. I know this because a PC here got infected with a mass-mailer trojan once. Instead of seeing the webpage you're trying to see, you are shown a page telling you that you've been infected, along with access to several tools for removing these kind of infections. If ALL ISPs did this, I would think that spam traffic would be heavily reduced.
What you are doing to filtering, it is wrong because all it does (when it works) is to keep you from reading spam and cost you CPU time.
The bandwidth already been spent once the spam reaches your filter.
A much better approach (IMHO) is to use greylisting along with a few fast spamtrap driven RBLS, this way the mail doesn't even get transmitted to my server and I save both CPU, bandwidth and time.
Since I switched I have gotten a max of 2 spams pr. day, some days the count is even zero.
There are two reasons this approach is so great:
1) The greylisting on its own will weed out all the non-compliant MTAs, most spammers use zombies that don't care if their payload gets delivered, so they never retry.
2) The real MTAs that spam might get to me before hitting a spamtrap, but the greylisting tells them to come back a bit later, by that time they have hit one or more spamtraps and get blocked by an RBL.
I have yet to think of a way for spammers to defeat this scheme and the cost to legitimate mail is a 10 minute delay the first time someone sends me mail.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
That's a git if you're running a mailing list... suddenly you can't browse the web.
I recall someone claiming that they had *made money* based on stock spam. The strategy was really simple: they shorted whatever stock that was being pushed by spam. Shorting a stock means you borrow shares of the stock and sell them. If the price of the stock drops, you buy shares to fulfill your short contact at a lower price than the ones you borrowed. You make money on the difference. Sounds simple but you're screwed if the price of the stock goes up.
Example: You "borrow" 500 shares of Pump-n-dump Enterprises at $5.00 a share and sell them making $2,500.00. It crashes to $0.10 per share. You buy 500 shares to fulfill your short contract at that price for $50.00. You net $2,450.00.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Yes. The fact that modern spam is unreadable garbage is a huge win for us, the good guys. It means that to run an effective spam campaign you now need to to spend say 10 million spams instead of only one. The success rate is way, way lower so you have to bump up the volume to get the same hit. If it weren't for botnets, spam would probably be on the decline by now because simply delivering the quantity of mail needed would be impractical. Unfortunately we do have botnets, so all we see is the same amount of spam, but more nonsensical. Still, if one day we can solve the botnet problem, it means the spam problem will largely be solved at the same time.
Viagra, and its competitors Cialis and Levitra, are all prescription drugs. Presumably, a lot of people either want to use them but don't actually need them, or are too embarassed to go to their doctor and admit they can't get it up. Buying online is anonymous and there's no risk of anybody finding out. You can't buy them from legit sites because they are prescription, so spammers mop up the black market. We could probably halve the volume of spam tomorrow by making Viagra non-prescription.
As to why people buy penny stocks on the advice of spam, well, I guess they are just morons.
We have no way of knowing how many legitimate delivery failures are caused by greylisting. That's because, as the parent points out, messages are rejected a priori and there's no quarantine to check. If you reject and for whatever reason it is not retransmitted, your mail is lost. Maybe this "shouldn't" happen but it does, and it happens often enough that it is not entirely obvious that its false positive rate is less than that of a spam filter.
It is also trivial for a spammer to defeat greylisting. Perhaps they don't at this time, but at any moment they could flip a switch and render your approach useless. Contrary to popular belief, state-of-the-art spam filters aren't so easily defeated.
Blacklisting doesn't suffer from the immediacy problem of greylisting, but it shares the problem of an unknown false positive rate, and mediocre false negative rate.
Then you contact your ISP and make arrangements, after you convince them that you're not a spammer.
Fairly simply. Though today it should be able to tell the difference between legitimate bulk email* and spam
Such as mail-type discussion groups, business relations like people who want to receive tiger direct's adds, etc...
When you're having to post random segments of encyclopedias and put your actual message into an image to get through the filters, it's a clue that you're not wanted.
Those types I'd like to see shot. Heck, I'd shoot them myself.
Oh, and I don't believe that spammers are truly a dime a dozen. I think that if we removed the 10 worst spammers we'd drop spam in the USA by 50% or more.
I don't read AC A human right
I know of no good ISP that bans such servers. Nor would I use any that did - that's retarded... I'm paying for the bandwidth and it's mine to use.
Consumer grade DSL is much faster than the servers that used to run ISP email systems just a few years ago - there's really no need to pay for expensive hosting unless you're a company needing 99.9% uptime. I do have hosts for some stuff but only that for which the bandwidth requirements exceed what DSL can provide.
Here's an even more effective method: almost all spam contains one of the letters {a, e, i, o, u}. Simply write a grep filter to reject all such messages!
Rule 1: never forward spam, even to abuse addresses, and absolutely never to the 'unsubscribe' address.
The only exception I know of is spamcop as they're (I think) trustworthy.
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I know of no good ISP that bans such servers. Nor would I use any that did - that's retarded... I'm paying for the bandwidth and it's mine to use.
Ok numbnuts, that's exactly the kind of attitude that spammers have. That they can do anything because they pay for it. You pay taxes for construction of roads and for schools, but that doesn't give you the right to drive 100 mph through a school zone. You have to have limits. There have to be rules.
I implemented SURBL recently, and it's helped a lot. Your filter extracts url's from the *body* of the e-mail, and checks them against SURBL's blacklist. The idea is that most spam is trying to get you to click on a link, and although they can forge the From: line, they're still constrained to give the address they want you to click on. This has been amazingly effective for me, and it's really nice because there are essentially no false positives. It won't necessarily work with pump-and-dump scams, though, since it's possible for them to say "buy SCOX," without giving a URL.
Find free books.
no not like the war on drugs , there we are mainly jailing low level dealers and end users #3 above, and let's face it there are a lot of people who want drugs( wheather we like it or not) . Nobody wants spam (except the spammers).Spam is attacking the very fabric of our society(the internet), do we let the few (spammers) destroy it or do we punish those who try.The war on drugs is not popular for several reasons ,no one in their right mind objects to removing murders ,rapists and child molesters from society , although some on moral grounds prefer long prison sentences to the death penality.
If you want to stop crime, the penalty should be,
and perceived to be:
- certain
- immediate
- more costly than the benefit of the crime
"Law and order" advocates generally advocate
draconian punishments, but there is no evidence
that they help, beyond counterbalancing the
benefit of the crime. Increased detection speed
and likelihood are far more effective.
You might think that draconian punishments increase
the expected cost, even with haphazard and delayed
detection, but they don't increase the perceived
cost nearly enough to counter the tacit "I will
beat the odds mentality" to which criminals and
lottery-ticket buyers cling.
In the case of spam, I'm not entirely convinced
that any of the three criteria are met, but
cranking up the third is certainly not "a solution"
as the parent indicated.
Well, one can only hope that this leads to some wider sweeping reforms, because as it stands now, the market is way too influenced by widespread fraud and insider trading. It's not anywhere close to being a legitimate market, it's more like a casino where a few favored gamblers get the nod, and even fewer just get lucky, and the rest lose, and maybe this wave of spam will spur some real change on the law enforcement side.
Or maybe mail servers will just start rejecting all binary attachments.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The problem is zombies, and the problem there is Microsoft products are unsuitable as shipped for use on the internet. Off the internet, different story, more or less functional, but to surf with and use email etc? Completely faulty product. Broken beyond design.
They are allowed to profit immensely, yet have no normal consumer warranty. Precedent setting major supreme court action here, class action would be the way to go, from individual users to ISPs, file suit,do it, sort this crap out. If software companies can demand patents and receive them-that means they should be *forced* to offer a warranty, including suitability for purpose, exactly the same as any other consumer product out there. One or the other, but not both. If software is just art, then copyrights only. If it is a product with patentability-make them have a warranty. Even just dead tree books-copyright only, because they are a product, have to have a warranty, it is implied. If the pages fall out with normal immediate use-they will be forced to recall them.
If Microsoft (or any other for sale software company) wants to still offer software with no warranty, call it a beta testing agreement, but then they can't charge a single penny for it. Shift the responsibility to where it belongs.
--and sorry leet trolls, before you even start, I don't give a rat's ass about some slashdork geek who claims he can keep his windows box "secure". That isn't the point at all. There are one hundred million people or a lot more who *can't* keep their machines secure, that's the point, that's why there is so much spam and other sorts of computer bogusness, because it's too hard for normal users to use this stuff even remotely safely on the internet, and microsoft software is insanely insecure and has a precedent going back years to prove it, despite numerous major releases all claiming to have "fixed" the problems.. It just is, admit freaking reality.
In this day and age you don't have to be an engineer to use normal consumer products. You shouldn't need to be a thermodynamics engineer and an EE to keep your refrigerator running. You shouldn't nneed to be a systems administrator and a programmer and a security guru to surf the internet. You don't need to be a telecommunications engineer to use a telephone. You don't need to be a professional audio engineer to use consumer audio equipment.
The cartel of Microsoft and the big box vendors KNOWINGLY ship consumer products that they make billions on knowing they are highly susceptible to malicious compromise. In legal terms, this is maintaining an attractive nuisance at a minimum. And I'll repeat the patent angle- you want a patent, want to maintain your typed up crap is some sort of "product" that you can charge money for? You need a warranty, or offer it for free for testing with a copyright only.
Or you can simply block all outbound port 25 except to very specific mail servers. Cox does this. At first I was a little miffed but then I realized it makes sense. You can still send mail to anywhere you just need to go through their mail server. So if you are running your own SMTP you simply set (for example) smtp.east.cox.net as your smart host and be done with it.
This way you stop most of the mass mailing trojans because they'd have to be smart enough to use the right smart host. Then, even if they do get smart enough to do that cox still has their mail server's log so they can easily show what went out.
The only wrinkle in this is a road warrior who wants to authenticate to his company's mail server so the mail appears to be coming from there. That is simple actually. Simply run a mail submission agent (MSA) on port 587 and reconfigure the clients to use port 587. An MSA only accepts authenticated connections.
ok the problem is that people/people worrying about spam are not publishing callerid and DKIM in DNS
before we blame ISP's for not doing it by default we must (those people who read slashdot) ask out hosts to do it
make sure we have done it for our domains
ANTISPAM NEEDS YOU
simple
if you send mail from a domain make sure it has a callerid and if possible use DKIM
ISP's who sell domains and put a MX record in by default Without at least a callerid record are wrong... lets correct ours and then ask them to correct theirs
spamassassin can check SPF and DKIM so enable it NOW !
regards
John Jones
p.s. setup yous now
Microsoft callerID and exchange/outlook resources
Kerio CallerID check to help chek your setup
yahoo resources on Domain Keys and setup for various MTA's
A big problem with most spam filters, especially the open source ones, is that they're single user. They're trying to work out from the content what's spam. Systems like gmail (and Spamcop before IronPort bought it) look at spam addressed to a large number of addresses. When roughly similar material starts showing up at a few hundred different addresses, the probability that it's spam is very high.
Here's a thought. Mail servers should, on receiving an SMTP connection from an IP address, probe that IP address to see if it's a Microsoft consumer-grade operating system. If so, reject the connection. That would put a dent in the zombie problem.
Spam will effectively destroy email as we know it. Too many people, too many messages, and too easy to get to people.
We will migrate to a system where a sender must have a "key" before email is accepted, and those keys are under the control of the reciever.
This kind of system will work much like email, as it is so popular and so useful people will only migrate from it slowly. Default keys for new email users will be simple (like a "1"). Once someone is getting enough connection, enough email, then mail clients will communicate automatically with known good senders and create an individual, bidirectional keypair so that future communication with known friends continues, while spam is shut off. In the future, sharing someone's "contact" will be more akin to sharing the private key they have to connect to a person. Once you see a new email address use a known key of someone else, you would accept it once, automatically regnerate the key for the original person, and watch the behavior to determine if it was spam or a legitimate introduction of a friend to a friend. To most users this system could work exactly like email now - just need to add more functionality to the mail clients' spam processing ability.
Ok numbnuts, that's exactly the kind of attitude that spammers have. That they can do anything because they pay for it.
Last I checked, spammers didn't pay to rent the bandwidth and processor time on each zombie machine they use.
You have to have limits. There have to be rules.
However, those limits shouldn't put a stop on legitimate activity. Just because _you_ do not have a legitimate reason to be running a mail server doesn't mean no one else does.
I'm all for ISPs cracking down on spammers, but not in a way that prevents people legitimately using the service.
(For the record, the great-great-great grandparent cited NTL as an example, who unfortunately have a history of _not_ dealing with abuse of their service, even when the recipient of the attack reports the abuse and supplies logging proving the source of the attack.)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
An underlying assumption is that these stock schemes are pump'n'dumps fostered by someone who has actually risked money on buying the stock. I don't think that's generally the case.
Whether a pump'n'dump succeeds or not, the broker handling the transactions will take his commission. Anyhting that increases a broker's transaction volume will increase his earnings, including shorts; he always takes his cut. A "shrewd" broker, like the ones known for calling nursing home residents to encourage them to day trade their life savings, don't need to do an actual pump'n'dump scheme; all they need to do is make it look like one is happening and wait for the suckers who want to take a ride on it. It doesn't matter whether the stocks go up or down, either way they collect when these are bought, and collect again when they are sold.
I think most of these stock scams are coming from sleazy brokers rather than stock speculators. Paying a few bucks a month to a spammer who is getting the same amount from a bunch of other brokers would be more than worthwhile when it increases the monthly transaction volume for all of them. Tracking the transactions he sees for the stocks the spammer decides to use is a simple way of checking whether the subscription to the spammer's service has been worthwhile.
Doing it this way, no one would actually have to work at researching pump'n'dump possibilities or risk any of their own money in a speculative buy. Also, there would be no way to trace back from the stock to the crooks, since the crooks never touched the stock itself. For con artists, this is a perfect deal. The marks suckered into it aren't going to talk about it: who is going to admit that they lost money trying to beat a pump'n'dump scheme?
Of course no one who reads slashdot would be dumb enough to fall for this scheme, right?
Mostly the grandparent post is guilty of something missing from the standard spam solution rebuttal checklist: insufficient details.
Yeah, a spam solution is almost certainly going to involve a modification to the SMTP protocol. The devil is in the details.
For my tastes, I'd be content to start with rejecting emails immediately rather than sending out "your email was rejected" messages. The number of valid "rejected" messages has got to be infinitesimal compared to the amount of address-guessing spam in the universe. About 1/3 of the spam I get comes from somebody's server rejecting somebody else's spam and telling me about it to no useful effect.
I HATE these stupid 'form letter' responses. They make the poster look like they know-it-all, and they preclude any REAL thought or discussion about the idea. That said, I have a simple, foolproof idea to help eliminate spam.
Email certification.
If you want to be able to send Certified Email (CE), you apply for Certification from the company that gives you internet connectivity. They check you out, and 'Certify' you as being a legitimate emailer (ie: not a spammer). Then, you generate a private/public key pair and give them the public one. In the headers of all your email, is their certification, and an encrypted header line that's createdusing your private key.
When email arrives at the recipients server (or this could be done at the client level, as well), the server sees the certification, and connects to the certifying server to get your public key. It attempts to decrypt the header line. If it does it marks the email as 'certified', if it cannot, it marks the email as 'uncertified', and the email client can be programmed to filter messages based on that.
Due to the public/private key cryptography, there can be no certified email spoofing. (Assuming the private keys are secure, the keys are of decent length, etc.) All emails are traceable back to the originating server. CORRECTION- all CERTIFIED emails are traceable. Anonymous email is still possible. People can still set up email servers for mailing lists without "having" to get them certified. And people can still receive non-certified mail.
If an email server sends out spam, the complaints go to it's certifier. They can drop the certification, deleting the public key from their server. When this happens, ALL the email from the spamming server is now 'uncertified', and gets handled accordingly by email clients. If nothing is done, complaints go to THEIR upstream, etc. Individuals and groups can keep their own blacklists, if they wish, and anyone can choose to filter emails according to those lists.
Now, I've looked over that 'form email' that people like to post to shoot down anti-spam ideas. And nothing applies to this idea. (If something seems to apply, it's because I either left out details, or explained something wrong.) This idea does NOT need to be universally adopted, nor does it need to be adopted by everyone all at once. It's primarily a way of reliably tracing (certified) emails back to their originating server. The anti-spam part comes later: if you receive certified spam, complain and get the server un-certified. If you receive un-certified spam... well, just have your email client dump all uncertified emails in the trash. (Not nessisarilly, you could just use it's un-certifedness as a factor in filtering your email.)
This idea does not require anything be changed with SMTP. It simply requires a second connection be made to the certifying server. Now, before you bitch about the extra bandwidth, I'd like to remind you that, once this idea catches on, spam will be greatly reduced. This reduction will MORE than make up for the slight increase in bandwidth created in querying the certifying servers. Also, the certifying servers can set time limits on when the certifications expire, and need to be re-downloaded (kind of like DHCP leases). A 'new' company that just applied for certification might have it's certificate set to expire almost instantly. This way, every email they send requires a download of the certificate. This allows the certificate to be pulled rapidly if they start spamming. After a month or two, it could be set to expire weekly or monthly.
To sum up: Email Certification is reliable way of tracing the certified emails back to their originating server. This allows spammers to be identified unequivocally, and have their certification pulled. Email servers are NOT required to be certified, and anonymous email is still possible. Email recipients can, if they choose, set up their client to send uncertified emails to the trash, or to handle them however they wish. White lists and black lists
Greylisting doesn't work anymore. You might block a few spammers but I do greylisting with the latest version of postgrey and I still wind up with about 50 spams a day that get through to my spamassassin... Spammers take non-fatal error returns and add them to the end of the list. X-Greylist: delayed 58065 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:58:49 UTC X-Greylist: delayed 48829 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 11:42:10 UTC X-Greylist: delayed 8054 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at xxxxx; Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:18:46 UTC That's from my spamassassin folder.
What I mean is, I'd like to change the protocol from:
.. time passes ...
Spammer: Here's some email
Server: Thanks!
Server: Hey, this is spam! Let's send it to jfengel!
to
Spammer: Here's some email
Server: Screw you. It's spam. (or "There's no such person here. I reject it now rather than having to call you back using the forged header.")
I suspect that the SMTP protocol already supports that. But in general, SMTP is heavily oriented towards store-and-forward in an intermittently connected, unreliable network, passing mail at midnight when the rates were cheap. Maybe that's still a good mode to support, since not everybody has high-speed lines and the network is still unreliable, but TCP and the backbone have solved the problem without some of the problems that come from store-and-forward.
The problem of stock spam can be fixed by the stock market. Zero tolerance. Automatically delist any stock advertised by spam.
How could that possibly help? Or were you just planning to pump-n-dump Microsoft from a Panera Bread the day after this law hit the books?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Whenever I see inconsistencies like that in a Python work, I just attribute it to the surrealist aspect of the group's sense of humour. The scene starts off as a normal cafeteria, and then suddenly spam starts popping up in the ingredients list, more and more, and eventually a chorus starts singing louder and louder in direct analogy to the prevalence of spam. The spam and musical crescendoes are more amusing when you set the list up to start with two spam-free menu items, and then you realise that you've been sucked into an evil parallel universe
:(
But we digress...sometimes I go through my bulk e-mail and read my spam's sender names and subjects for a good dose of surrealist humour. Let's see what I have from today that's especially funny:
Winston Beaver sent me "Hussy so agreeable and cultured!"
Patti asked me "yoou wantt punctilious Cuties?"
Freeman Childress wanted to talk to me "Re: Loan requets approved"
Stockroom P. Groundwork and Unkinder R. Restudy sent me blank e-mails.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I keep seeing variations on this idea, and while it's perfectly sound in the abstract, in practice it simply will not happen.
The problem is that certification is useless until the vast majority of email servers are certified.
I know, you said this isn't true, but I don't think you understand the situation. Spam filtering at the client level doesn't affect spam -- the suckers who the spam targets are NOT configuring filters at home. Yes, the geeks will get their family server in the basement certified in their spare time, and all their friends will send them certified messages. The spammers won't give a damn, because they're perfectly happy if the geeks and antispammers don't read their spam (they don't buy anyway).
So -- can you imagine an ISP filtering out email at the server level based on certification? No -- because all grandma cares about is getting Junior's emails, and when they stop coming (because his ISP's servers are in the 95% still uncertified) she gets on the phone and starts costing them money... and don't forget the time/money they spent implementing the filter, testing it, rolling out with hopefully no glitches/downtime, monitoring it, etc..
They might put a flag in the subject line of uncertified emails... okay, but it shows up in the emails from the bank, from the kids, from work... the complaints roll in. Cash flows out. So filtering is a liability.
But what about their own outgoing mail? Certify? Well, again it'll cost a chunk of time (money) to learn, setup and maintain 24/7/365 with the occasional confused complaint, it'll possibly cost their users some downtime particularly if they screw it up, and it'll gain them *nothing* for now, because no one is filtering yet (see above).
No brainer decision when your staff is already stretched thin.
The last link is the upstream access provider. They would need to implement the system and hire the staff for accepting complaints (online? via phone?), filtering out the sabotage from the real complaints, collecting evidence of abuse, dealing with angry ISPs on the phone, establishing/expiring/revoking certification, etc..
Will they go for it? Again, big cost, big headaches, and no gain until that magical day when everyone is on board.
Seriously, there's a positive push because no one likes spam, and everyone would gain from a plan that would actually curb it... but people need to come up with something that will work on the low level.
The SPF system is one that DOES help incrementally more as implementation spreads. It mitigates joe-jobs and backscatter for all domains with a SPF DNS record, and is trivial for server admins to implement. AND it doesn't cost anything if mail servers reject mail that fails the test: valid email will come from the server listed in the DNS record, OR the server may have no SPF record yet (let it through). Spammers can only spoof addresses without SPF records, since they can't set up their own SPF record -- they'd be easily traceable when they spam, since the domain registrar would have credit card info, etc..
Even at early stages, there's benefit for server admins to filter (removes spam safely from any domain with an SPF record), and there's benefit for adding the SPF record (please, filter out spam that pretends to be from me! my customers don't like it).
It's not perfect... forwarding email and badly created records can cause issues, plus while AOL has implemented basic SPF filtering Microsoft is involved and trying to mix XML into the record format somehow....
Personally I feel the BlueFrog approach is the strongest for non-stock-pump spam... but obviously a decentralized approach is required to avoid Blue Security's fiery downfall. The main problem with this system is that human analysis is required to analyze spam and write scripts for leaving complaints.
Two points:
1) Email has never been an instant messaging system, I've tried getting people to stop asking for an IRC/ICQ/MSN/AIM/whatever chat and just use email, but nobody listens.
2) Any mail server that doesn't retry when given a temporary failure code is broken and needs to be replaced, sooner rather than later.
In any case, I do review my mail logs (well I did the first two weeks of using the new system) and I saw exactly zero false positives.
The spamtrap driven RBLS I use all list and delist servers quickly, so they also cause no false positives, but if they ever do the user who sent me the unlucky ham will get a nice bounce message, so he will be able to retry the mail or call me.
I think getting bounce is much nicer than just having your mail eaten by a filter.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
You seem to have missed the "+ RBL part".
Most spammers seem to hit a number of spamtraps with each zombie at some point, so using spamtrap driven RBLS in front of greylisting means that the RBLs will take care of the verified spammers.
greylisting gives the spamtraps some extra time to get hit, so rather than do actual blocking itself it augments the RBLs.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Say you've got a regional provider(ie a Chinese ISP), anyone in a given region can only connect to that ISP because there are no alternatives(this is most definitely the case). Now say that that ISP, as is often the case in certain parts of the world, doesn't give a rats about its clients sending SPAM, and is perfectly willing to certify them. Now by your system the ISP should lose its certification, which means that any legitimate users of the system also lose their certification, which means they can't send certified e-mail to anyone.
This system is also expensive, not so much in bandwidth, but in human time. Verifying someone's identity and intentions is expensive and time consuming, even for an ISP, and for something like hotmail or gmail, which people use for perfectly legitimate reasons, it's be pretty much impossible.
So in the end, what you have is an expensive system which is essentially a complicated form of blacklisting, which as I said, sucks.