North American Network Operators Group

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anti-spam vs network abuse

  • From: jlewis
  • Date: Thu Feb 27 22:38:39 2003

We (Atlantic.Net) have gotten a flurry of abuse complaints from people 
who's systems have been scanned by 209.208.0.15 (rt.njabl.org...a DNSBL 
hosted on our network).  I'm hoping the new PTR record will head off many 
complaints now.

For the past 15 months, NJABL has reactively tested systems that have
connected to participating SMTP servers to see if those systems are open
relays.  Just over a week ago, NJABL added open proxy testing to its relay
testing software.  The proxy testing checks for a variety of common proxy
software/protocols on about 20 different ports simultaneously.  This is
apparently setting off some IDS/firewall alarms.

We do not consider what NJABL does abuse, and we reply to all the 
complaints explaining that the complainant should go have a look at 
http://njabl.org/ and hopefully they'll understand why their system was 
scanned.

This sort of activity is becoming more common / mainstream, so people
ought to just get used to it.  Road Runner is doing the same thing
(according to http://sec.rr.com/probing.htm) which is pretty ironic given
how their security department has gotten along with (or not) various
DNSBLs in the past.

BTW...in the week that NJABL has been testing for open proxies, more than
18000 have been detected, pretty much all of which are actively being
abused by spammers, else mail would not have come through them.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis *[email protected]*|  I route
 System Administrator        |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |  
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