North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Time to check the rate limits on your mail servers

  • From: Raymond Dijkxhoorn
  • Date: Thu Feb 03 09:25:31 2005

Hi!

http://news.com.com/Zombie+trick+expected+to+send+spam+sky-high/2100-7349_3-5560664.html?tag=cd.top

that botnets are now routing their mail traffic through the local
ISP's mail servers rather than trying their own port 25
connections.

Now?  We (and AOL, and some other large networks) have been seeing
this thing go on since over a year.
Indeed, we also see this a long time now. Most of them specific spamruns towards the bigger players... (AOL alike).

Do you let your customers send an unlimited number of
emails per day? Per hour? Per minute? If so, then why?

One additional thing that I think wasnt mentioned in the article -
Make sure your MXs (inbound servers) are separate from your outbound
machines, and that the MX servers dont relay email for your dynamic IP
netblock. Some other trojans do stuff like getting the ppp domain name
/ rDNS name of the assigned IP etc and then "nslookup -q=mx
domain.com", then set itself up so that all its payloads get delivered
out of the domain's MX servers
So the next article would say 'lets now all seperate MX and SMTP servers' still a LOT of large players combining those two. Giving troyans doing the above scenario a open door.

Bye,
Raymond.