Dutch ISP Files Police Complaint Against Spamhaus

judgecorp writes "Dutch ISP A2B has filed police complaints against anti-spam project Spamhaus, calling its CEO 'nuts' and accusing him of blackmail. Spamhaus added all A2B's addresses to a spam blacklist, when A2B did not obey the letter of its demands in blocking a spammer."

Comments

Incorrect summary

[TechLA]

A2B DID block the spammer, they blocked his ip. What Spamhaus wanted was stop routing traffic for the whole CyberBunker (who route traffic for The Pirate Bay etc) who are not spammers. They had a single customer that spammed, and A2B as upstream provider blocked that ip instead. What they didn't do was block the innocent CyberBunker completely, and after that Spamhaus added A2B - completely third party - to their blacklist. That's complete bullshit and blackmail.

Re:Incorrect summary

[Anonymous Coward]

If spamhaus starts blacklisting entities that do not spam, people will stop trusting and using spamhaus. Police or no, Spamhaus is harming itself when it oversteps its natural bounds.

Re:Incorrect summary

[TheMMaster]

Thanks for that!

I rent a server at cyberbunker and I have had long email discussions with spamhaus as well, with them going so far as suggesting that I go an find a new ISP.

Especially since the IP space I got from them is just a regular PA, and the ranges whois informations has a record with my personal name, address and telephone number in it. Spamhaus doesn't understand how the Internet works and is trying to basically nuke the cyberbunker from orbit by going one provider up the chain until they can find someone that will turn off every route...

Whereas the original spam report for the range was just ONE /29 that has the correct whois information...

"Just pure spam and crime" that is rather offensive considering that I just run my personal email, xmpp and some other services there. You're just as bad as spamhaus.

At the time I made a /. submission about it, I'll reproduce it below since the submission was rejected at the time:
---------
"I run a small server for some minor projects of mine, a mailserver for my family and several friends at a hosting provider. A couple of weeks ago my father started to complain that some of his mails were no longer being received. Upon further inspection it turned out that my entire ISP's IP range (the entire /19) was put in the Spamhaus Blocklist (SBL). After sending a request to de-list the IP range I control (a /29 in their /19), I got the following response: "Due to the hosting policies of the owner of this IP address block, our users do not wish to accept traffic from these IPs. We suggest you look for other arrangements as to your hosting."

The "Hosting policies" of my ISP do not appear to differ greatly from other ISPs, they name spamming as a breach of their TOS and do disconnect spammers. The only major difference I can see is that they do not give out personal information or kick (non spamming) clients off of the web without being legally forced to, which is a requirement in the EU country they are based in to qualify as a telco (and be not responsible for the content of their customers' websites) This stance towards net neutrality is why I chose them in the first place. Vote with your wallet, right?

According to the Spamhaus website The SBL's primary objective is to avoid 'false positives' while blocking as much spam as possible. To me blocking an entire ISP's netblock for, according to the listing, a grand total of three consecutive /29's that were originally reported (and likely from the same customer) and an entire /24 that's labeled entirely as "trademark fraud replicas" does not seem to me to be "avoiding false positives".

The end result is that without sending a single spam or hosting any malicious content, Spamhaus labels me a spammer and even 'cybercriminal' according to the SBL listing all because they apparently don't like my ISP . My questions being: Did any one of you ever find yourself between this particular rock and hard place? Did you manage to get the issue resolved without switching ISPs? And perhaps: Is it really Spamhaus' place to decide what ISP I use considering I'm a good netizen?"
-----

Re:It's all about the Opinion

[TheCarp]

Right, except that many people just configure their mail servers to take that opinion as gospel, and spamhaus certainly makes it easy to do so and encourages it.

So legally, you are indeed right. However, the end result is that their opinion carries a lot of weight, mostly because many many people just blindly apply it.

So, in effect, they become judge jury and executioner, in that, once their opnion is that you have transgressed, you will instantly be blackballed all over the internet. They have become little more than a bully, which is too bad because, I mostly like them and mostly agree that this is the right way to operate.

Of course.... I JUST posted my experience with them (or I should say, the experience that I came back from vacation to find one of my co-admins had):

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2474882&cid=37703752

Re:It's all about the Opinion

[macraig]

Spamhaus publishes their Opinion about who are spam problems. It's a lot like Slashdot posts, which are the various contributor's Opinions.

What a quaint mis-framing by using the word "opinion" rather than what it actually is: a declaration. It's much more affirmative than a mere "opinion".

This, BTW, is precisely why ALL blacklists are a crappy idea that ultimately always lead to this scenario. Crowdsourcing this sort of privacy/security function to anonymous people with unverified credibility leads to the well being poisoned with deliberate or unintended misinformation. They are even vulnerable to ill-intentioned people with axes to grind and a willingness to wreck significant swaths of the Internet to exact their vengeance.

Re:It's all about the Opinion

[Spazmania]

the end result is that [Spamhaus'] opinion carries a lot of weight, mostly because many many people just blindly apply it.

Mostly because Spamhaus rarely lists address ranges that aren't involved in spamming and network abuse, and even more rarely for long. Spamhaus EARNED its reputation for cautious listing at the same time others like SORBS earned reputations for over-zealousness.

That's why I'm surprised to see Slashdot folks taking these accusations seriously without any posted evidence. When Spamhaus lists an IP block, they document it publicly including their reasons. Sometimes it's because an organization has been caught moving spammers around inside their IP block. Sometimes there are other reasons. Usually they're pretty good reasons.

Where's the copy of that posting?

I know back when I ran an ISP, Spamhaus was the one I -didn't- have problems with.