North American Network Operators Group

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Netgate.net.nz/ORBS spam colusion

  • From: Dean Anderson
  • Date: Fri Jan 07 22:04:57 2000

I would like to get your opinions on this.

I have been in touch with Netgate.net.nz, which now transports ORBS illegal
traffic into the US.  ORBS (Alan Brown) has indicated on spam-l that ORBS
has (illegally by 18 USC 1030 2(b), 2(c), and 3) scanned thousands of US
government computers, and that the purpose of ORBS is to enable "script
kiddies" to exploit sites that relay, thus inducing those sites not to
operate relay services. ORBS' advertising of our site as free misuses our
trademark.  ORBS commits frauds on those who believe its false advertising
and then subsequently use listed sites to relay without authorization.

All this has been brought to the attention of Netgate.net.nz.

Netgate is unwilling to block this traffic, which results in unauthorized
relay attempts on ours and others services.  Netgate claims it is a "US
carrier" and is exempt from any responsibility for the behavior of it
customers after complaints have been made about them.  Our theory is
basically that Netgate must react to complaints about violations of US law
by its customers or find itself named a codefendant.

It seems we have reached the limit of civil discusions.  Before we start
suing Netgate, and listing them as the responsible party on our next relay
complaint (unauthorized use of computer of more than $5000), I'd like to
air out some of our non-litiguous options before some other operators.

So I'd like to propose the possibility that we should start probing New
Zealand sites with SATAN, and publish site vulnerabilities on a web page,
just like ORBS does.  We would then deny responsibility for any resulting
attacks on those sites by "script kiddies". Just like ORBS does.

Of course, if this were actually done, I would expect we would then find
ourselves blocked, and perhaps disconnected by our upstreams.  I would tend
to think that most other ISP's would find this kind of behavior
unacceptable. I also tend to think that our upstreams should respond to
such complaints and take action to stop this activity.  But perhaps I'm
wrong. I'd like to find out the reaction of various operators to such
activity.

I'm not seriously considering using SATAN this way, but I would like to
hear how others would approach the problem posed by someone who did. I hope
that will be helpful in forming our response to Netgate.net.nz.

		--Dean
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           Plain Aviation, Inc                  [email protected]
           LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP          http://www.av8.com
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