North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs

  • From: blitz
  • Date: Wed Sep 11 16:05:42 2002

Getting your entire corporate LAN dumped into the RBL mess could be devastating, how much productivity lost? How much time wasted getting OFF the RBL? How many contacts missed, correspondences missed?

You could be getting into a very rough ride for some days to some weeks, as the block information propagates down the food chain, then as the un-block does likewise.

Its just better to take the defensive and encrypt in the first place.

Agreed, for cyber-squatter places like coffee shops and airports, this could be a pain.




At 08:01 9/11/02 -0400, you wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 12:45:23PM +0200, John Angelmo wrote:
> Just cause there are unprotected WLANs dosn't imply that spammers use
> them (perhaps its to hard for the spammers ;)).
> Corporations should protect ther WLANs but saying that spamming is a
> great threat is to overdo it.

        To some extent.

        Imagine a few of the following scenarios:

        1) You wok for an ISP and have access through them.  One large
enough that they apply their AUP to their own people.  You have ISDN/DSL
or some other connection w/ reverse-dns for your personal domain @ home.
Someone drives by your place, finds your unprotected lan, sends spam, hacks,
etc..  complaints come in, you lose job because you were a spammer and
your employer needs to stop, etc.
        2) You are a small company, someone does this, and you get
blacklisted as a spamhaus.  you are unable to get internet access.
        3) you have a cable modem as your only high-speed connectivity.
you have one of the linksys/whatever nat+802.11a/b boxen.  you
get used, you get blacklisted and can not get high-speed pr0n again.