Post by thread:[OT] SPAM

Hello friends. It could be a coincidence, but since February when I joined PicList, increased substantially the quantity of spam email I receive daily. Years before February 99, it was "ok" to receive two or three spam advertisement weekly, right now I am receiving more than 15 daily! I could be sending this email directly to Mark or Jori, to try to check (by a download log) Awho already downloaded the subscribers list, or if it is possible to hack into the system to get it, I bet it is, since the list is large and a natural attraction to hackers willing to sell or use it, but more people could be suffering this spam attack. For sure I just programmed the mail filters to avoid them, 8 to 10 use the same mail server (invalid or inexistent of course), since I don't want to change my email address. If you have a similar situation, please email me directly, *** DON'T PESTER THE LIST WITH THIS SUBJECT MORE THAN I AM DOING RIGHT NOW ***, together we can study the situation and try to find out more information about it. This kind of situation is somehow normal on Internet, your email appears on the messages, and anyone can build a distribution list. Being part of any list has this kind of problems that we need to learn how to deal with and still alive. Wagner. [spam_OUTwagnerlTakeThisOuTustr.net]

I'll keep this list-wide for this message, so you all know what I know. I know somewhat about SPAM fighting... More to learn, definitely. Someone at MIT might be able to get at the list, but users of the list aren't (far as I know) able to download the list - just the Admins. (Who are "Jory and Me", that should make one grammar-finnicky person happy, still feels wrong to meselfs <G>) Could be that someone hacked in, though, or some SPAMmer's apprentice joined the list for a time, tapped all the e-mail addresses they could, and threw them in their in basket. (If I were a Spammer, I'd go join many mailing lists and consider them a good source of valid e-mail addresses. SICKENING thought, that! They probably do it, hard to catch them at it.) Another perhaps more likely possibility is that someone used one of the mail server or SMTP abuse tools that're all over the place, to dig into Earthlink and find out what addresses were present at Earthlink - this is effectively a "Denial of Service" Attack, the Earthlink Admins would know if they had had some tool like this used there in January or February, as it basically tends to kill their servers, etc. Basically some bozo tries to reach "a", then "aa", then "aaa", there at Earthlink (or any other reachable mail server), given all possible permutations you can imagine that this slows down the server somewhat! (with just a-z and 0-9, you have "Quite a few" permutations possible in 8 characters, and far more in 16 or so. The server has to handle each.) Several "Flavors" of such attacks exist; the Abuse/Unix/Linux community has come up with a smart strategic solution (delay answers to each query by some time, say 15 seconds, after the first answer, to allow other traffic to flow. Makes this form of attack totally useless, without seriously messing up other e-mail's flow. 15 seconds times a huge number is a LOOONG time, long enough to backtrack the SPAMMer, and nuke them. Also, you could feed false answers to such a process <Evil Grin>) I helped get one company selling such a piece of "SPAMWare" through NWLink connectivity stopped - they quit selling that software, in part I hope to my comments to the abuse desk here <G> {Mike Lyman of Microsoft, an abuse guy there, also helped lots!} I have a standard "how to track SPAM" message I pass to people who ask, I'll just drop in a few URLs here, for those interested, and stop (We're getting off PICList too far otherwise.) http://www.ao.net/waytosuccess/nospam.html is Leah's Anti-SPAM pages, she takes you through tutorials, has tons of links, and will help you in e-mail if needed (So will I, Leah's pretty busy so ask & I'll help you.) http://samspade.org/ has tools - all the tools you could want, almost. Want to back track a Spammer, the tools are here, the tutorial's at Leah's site <G> http://www.anonymizer.com/3.0/index.shtml lets you look at a Spammers' site without telling them all about yourself - You can get your anti-Spam complaint together, see their entire web page, etc., better than the anonymous browser on Sam Spade. Slower, OTOH. Finally, http://abuse.net/ has a free forwarding service which you can either subscribe to - or just go look up - which I use to look up those elusive Abuse desk e-mail addresses for each ISP on the 'Net. (Abuse@, Postmaster@, Spam@, Support@, JoeBlow@, NoSpam@, Spam_Report@, the names aren't sensible nor standardized, dangit!) Abuse.Net makes things a LOT easier, and it's free, you just have to register if you want to use him as an e-mail re-director. (Then you send e-mail to .....NWLink.ComKILLspam@spam@abuse.Net, for example, to have it redirected to the abuse desk here where I get connectivity.) Mark, who's posted enough on this for today <G> Wagner Lipnharski wrote: {Quote hidden}> > Hello friends. It could be a coincidence, but since February when I > joined PicList, increased substantially the quantity of spam email I > receive daily. > > Years before February 99, it was "ok" to receive two or three spam > advertisement weekly, right now I am receiving more than 15 daily! > > I could be sending this email directly to Mark or Jori, to try to check > (by a download log) Awho already downloaded the subscribers list, or if > it is possible to hack into the system to get it, I bet it is, since the > list is large and a natural attraction to hackers willing to sell or use > it, but more people could be suffering this spam attack. > > For sure I just programmed the mail filters to avoid them, 8 to 10 use > the same mail server (invalid or inexistent of course), since I don't > want to change my email address. > > If you have a similar situation, please email me directly, *** DON'T > PESTER THE LIST WITH THIS SUBJECT MORE THAN I AM DOING RIGHT NOW ***, > together we can study the situation and try to find out more information > about it. > > This kind of situation is somehow normal on Internet, your email appears > on the messages, and anyone can build a distribution list. Being part > of any list has this kind of problems that we need to learn how to deal > with and still alive. > > Wagner. [wagnerlKILLspamustr.net]