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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Motion for a new POST NSF AUP
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 95 08:13:54 GMT From: "William Allen Simpson" <[email protected]> > As a matter of course, whenever I receive a spam, I will generally send > a complaint to postmaster at the originating site, or perhaps to the > ISP, if I can determine it. In fact, I'm thinking about automating this > procedure, to decrease the amount of time that it takes for me to send > the complaint. I also have a template file which I use to save time. How do you automate finding the postmaster and ISP? I cannot seem to figure it out. Well, I'd only seriously consider bothering the ISP if [email protected] hasn't responded, or if it's obvious that perp.site is a PPP-only site that's connected to an ISP (in which case [email protected] is probably the same as [email protected]). Figuring out the ISP isn't too hard; you can look at the nameservers for perp.site (especially if it's a PPP-only link, the ISP is probably providing nameservice), or you can use traceroute. The other thing to keep in mind is that in the case of the magazine spam, the e-mail contact address for requested responses was posted. So instead of needing to try to figure out the actual posting address from the forgery, you can also just simply send complaints to [email protected] (looks like the spammers were taking advantage of a freenet site, which also deserved to get flooded with complaints; they had several different accounts on that freenet site). In the case where the perpatrators of the spam leave a 1-800 number as the contact point, you can simply call them up and give them abuse for spamming the internet. Again, if enough people do this it will become economically unfeasible for spammers to continue. (There's an extremely hilarious story going around about someone who posted the 1-800 number alt.sex.* as a phone sex line; the poor company got flooded with lots of calls, which skyrocketed their 1-800 bill and embarassed the heck out of their (mostly female) receptionists. I don't recommend that people try this do, since posting the 1-800 number as a phoen sex number is obviously fraud. But it *is* extremely amusing to hear about it happening.) The hard part of trying to automate it is that there are a lot of hueristics. But it certainly would be possible to build tools that automated at least part of the detective work. - Ted
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