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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: Spam. Again.. -- and blocking net blocks?
Quick Comment as a NANOG lurker and SPEWS lurker (news.admin.net-abuse.email). I'm not defending SPEWS, don't speak for SPEWS but will describe what I understand happens: SPEWS initially lists offending IP address blocks from non-repentant SPAM sources. If the upstream ISP does nothing about it, that block tends to expand to neighboring blocks to gain the attention of the ISP. High level concept: Block the SPAMMER - ISP Does nothing Block the SPAMMER's Neighboring Blocks (Collateral Damage) - Motivates neighbors to find new Upstream/Isp - Motivates neighbors to complain to upstream/ISP - Gains the attention of the Upstream/ISP Expand the Block - Ditto Block the ISP as a whole The SPEWS concept prevents an ISP from allowing spammers on some blocks while trying to service legitimate customers on others. For an ISP - it is either all or none over time, you support spammers and are blocked as a whole (to include innocent customers). If you do end up mistakenly on SPEWS or take care of your spamming customers - you can appeal to them at news.admin.net-abuse.email, get flamed pretty bad, and eventually fall off the list. I do personally like the idea of holding the ISP as a whole accountable over time. An ISP can stay off spews, I've never had a block listed - though when I'm in a decision making position, I've never tolerated a spammer. Hansel -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 08:36 To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: Spam. Again.. -- and blocking net blocks? > Problem: > For some reason, spews has decided to now block one of our /19.. Ie no mail > server in the /19 can send mail. > Questions: > 1) How do we smack some sense into spews? Make it easy for them to identify the fact that your downstream ISP customer has allocated that /32 to a separate organisation. This is what referral whois was supposed to do but it never happened because development of the tools fizzled out. If SPEWS could plug guilty IP addresses into an automated tool and come up with an accurate identification of which neighboring IP addresses were tainted and which were not, then they wouldn't use such crude techniques. Imagine a tool which queries the IANA root LDAP server for an IP address. The IANA server refers them to ARIN's LDAP server because this comes from a /8 that was allocated to ARIN. Now ARIN's server identifies that this address is in your /19 so it refers SPEWS to your own LDAP server. Your server identifies your customer ISP as the owner of the block, or if your customer has been keeping the records up to date with a simple LDAP client, your server would identify that the guilty party is indeed only on one IP address. Of course, this won't stop SPEWS from blacklisting you. But it enables SPEWS to quickly identify the organization (your customer ISP) that has a business relationship with the offender so that SPEWS is more likely to focus their attentions on these two parties. > 2) Does anyone else see a HUGE problem with listing a /19 because there is > one /32 of a spam advertised website? When did this start happening? It's a free country, you can't stop people like the SPEWS group from expressing their opinions. As long as people are satisfied with crude tools for mapping IP address to owner, this kind of thing will continue to happen. --Michael Dillon
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