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Spamhaus Calls for Fining Operators of Insecure Servers

Posted by Unknown on from the banned-from-the-net dept.

Barence writes "Anti-spam outfit Spamhaus has called on the UK government to fine those who are running Internet infrastructure that could be exploited by criminals. Those who leave open Domain Name Server resolvers vulnerable to attack should be fined, if they have previously received a warning, said chief information officer of Spamhaus, Richard Cox. When Spamhaus was hit by a massive distributed DDoS possibly the biggest ever recorded at more than 300Gbits/sec — open DNS resolvers were used to amplify the hit, which was aimed at one of the organization's upstream partners. 'Once they know it can be used for attacks and fraud, that should be an offense,' Cox said. 'You should be subject to something like a parking ticket... where the fine is greater than the cost of fixing it."

5 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Another cure that is worse than the disease by melonman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This sounds great in theory but, in practice, it's going to be almost impossible to enforce (eg whose definition of 'vulnerable'?) and it would promptly create several new Internet plagues, eg the "Your server has a vulnerability, pay us now to stop us reporting it" spam email.

    --
    Virtually serving coffee
    1. Re:Another cure that is worse than the disease by UPi · · Score: 5, Informative

      You are merely lucky. I run 3 small mail servers, all very similar in setup. 1 also receives no spam whatsoever, the other two are flooded by it. I need to use Spamhaus's XBL, SPF and graylisting to stem the tide. If I removed either of the three, SPAM volume would exceed regular mail volume about 20x. (This is not because of a lack of regular mail.)

  2. I used to love Spamhaus by LordKaT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, I used to love Spamhaus, but as the years wore on, I got into the IT world, and I had to interact with them I've come to really loathe them. A decent service, I guess, but every single person that is involved with them comes across like a whining child, and I hate ever having to interact with them.

  3. As long... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...as server operators can fine Spamhaus for false positives.

  4. Punishment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny how an organisation as Spamhouse, who is guilty of systematic depriving random and quite innocent internet users of connectivity -- and proud of it too -- , suddenly thinks that whomever interferes with their connectivity should be punished by law. Hypocrisy.

    Although I think their service does have its good points, their attitude makes me want to hurl.