| Recent
Articles |
Strategies for Preventing Comment Spam
Bloggers are painfully aware of website owners who try to improve their websites
rank by adding links to blogs. There are several strategies for combating this
problem.
How Spammers Get Your Email Address
Are you wondering how spammers get your email address? There are a few tricks
they have for getting your address and once you see them you will see how important
it is to protect your 'real' address and only give it to family, friends, and
work contacts.
Is
SMO SPAM?
I was recently reading a post on Marc
Pentermann's blog that suggests social media optimization is pretty much SPAM
for social media. I think the issue of SPAM and any kind of marketing will always
exist regardless of the medium. Email, web pages, blogs and social media are all
susceptible.
Ringtone
Spam In Google News
Jeremy Wagstaff found some really bad examples of spam in Google News. Apparently,
since Google hasn't figured out yet that indexing the message boards of Vibe Magazine
is an awful idea (and completely against the purpose of Google News), spammers
are hitting that board hard with "free ringtone" spam.
Perspectives
on Blog Spam
What do Nicholas Cage, David Carradine, Susan Hayward, Richard Burton and a whole
host of Hollywood stars past and present have in common? Their names have been
hijacked by blog spammers, according to Akismet
which stops spam appearing on my blog.
|
 |
|
10.11.06
Spammer Cajoles ICANN To Ban Spamhaus
 By
David Utter
The Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) published by Spamhaus.org could be in jeopardy
as a potential court order may compel ICANN to suspend the Spamhaus domain name,
all at the behest of a mass mailer.
Mail system administrators subscribe to the Spamhaus RBL as a way to stop mass mailers on that list from bombarding their mail servers with thousands or millions of messages. Spamhaus collects details on those offenders from around the world, and publishes them on a RBL called the Spamhaus Blackhole List.
A litigant for the company e360insight sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court. Since Spamhaus is operated by Steve Linford, who is based in the United Kingdom, and does not do business in Illinois, Spamhaus did not appear in court. Techdirt posted how e360insight won an $11 million judgment against Spamhaus in this case:
While part of the reason Spamhaus may have lost was Steve Linford's decision to basically ignore the case and not show up or defend Spamhaus at all, it's still not at all clear how the $11 million was picked as the number -- but the whole thing seems problematic. All Spamhaus does is put together a list of companies or individuals who Spamhaus has collected evidence on suggesting they're spammers.
Instead of collecting, e360insight has another goal - to drive Spamhaus off the Internet, said SecuriTeam's Gadi Evron in describing the aftermath of the Illinois court's proposed order to ICANN to suspend the Spamhaus.org domain name:
After this court ruling, Spamhaus.org was under a DDoS attack, in my opinion for the purpose of preventing users from reaching the information it provided about the court ruling.
This was done along-side a Joe Job, sending fake email appearing to come from Spamhaus's CEO, Steve Linford. This email provided disinformation about the court ruling, claiming that anyone who uses the Spamhaus service can be facing legal action. This was false.
Spamhaus carried the two-page court order on its website. They have also posted a response to the order:
Spamhaus.org's Spam Advisory List, the Spamhaus Block List, blocks 50 Billion spams per day across the Internet, therefore the effect of suddenly not blocking such a large amount of spam would mean that volume of unwanted junk hitting mail server queues all over the world.
That in itself has a technical effect we can not properly estimate but would certainly cause very serious problems in most countries. Technical issues aside, the vast majority of those 50 Billion spams are highly illegal, spam for drugs, extreme pornography, scams and bank phishes.
The effect of 650 million email boxes (Spamhaus' userbase) suddenly receiving such a barrage of illegal spam, scams and bank phishes is, in my opinion, extremely dangerous. For this reason alone we believe that ICANN suspending spamhaus.org is almost certainly a no-starter.
Spamhaus is working with lawyers to try and mitigate the impact of this action by the court.
About the
Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews, WebProNews,
and InternetFinancialNews. |
