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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes
Actually, running a web server on 8290 isn't as easy as 80. SpamAssassin tests (WEIRD_PORT) for this, as do many other filtering packages. Forcing spammers to use non-standard ports will greatly increase their rate of detection, and in turn help to solve the spam problem. -Mike -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 9:56 AM To: Joe Boyce Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Joe Boyce wrote: > VA> Personally, I think preventing residential broadband customers from hosting > VA> servers would limit a lot of that. I'm not saying that IS the solution. > > It's not like those customers are aware they are hosting servers, they > most likely were exploited and are now unaware they are hosting > websites. That's obviously the case. No spammer has "thousands" of legitimately purchased DSL/Cable connections. The article pretty clearly says they're exploiting insecure windows (isn't that redundant?) boxes. Trouble is, how do you stop this? Just blocking common ports like 80 by default (unless the customer plans to actually run a web server and asks for the filter to be removed) won't work. The spammers can just as easily spam with urls containing ports (http://blah.biz:8290/) if they find 80 is filtered or find that filtering has become common. So other than waiting some infinitely long time for a secure out of the box version of windows (and for everyone to upgrade), how do you stop this? Widespread deployment of reflexive access lists? Force all broadband customers to use NAT and let them forward ports or entire IPs to their private IP servers if they have any? Wait for the legal system to catch and prosecute a few people who do this and deter others from trying it? Convince registrars to kill domains that are clearly being used by thieves? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *[email protected]*| I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
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