North American Network Operators Group
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Re: ORBS (Re: Scanning)

  • From: Albert Meyer
  • Date: Sun May 27 21:19:21 2001 
At 10:35 AM 5/26/01 -0400, Christopher A. Woodfield wrote:
About two years ago the <vijay> promising local ISP </vijay> I worked
for saw the number or ORBS-listed hosts withing its netspace go from ~400
to over 3,000 in one week. Among the listings was a class C where EVERY HOST,
254 IPs, in the block was listed. Granted, each one was an open relay, but the
point is that each IP was individually relay tested. When questioned about
this, Alan Brown reponded that he had "received an unusually large number
of nominations" for hosts in our netspace. Uh huh. Sure.
I really shouldn't contribute to this off-topic thread but I'm not very good at resisting temptation.

Anyone who claims that ORBS doesn't scan is using an extremely narrow definition of the word scanning. If you take a list of hundreds of IP addresses, and relay-test every IP on that list, is that scanning? ORBS supporters claim that it is not. Don't take my word for it, ask one. Try something like "Didn't Alan Brown admit on SPAM-L back in 99 that he will take a list of hundreds of addresses which is submitted by one of his supporters and relay-test every IP on it, without any evidence that any address on the list has ever delivered spam?"