News and announcements: March 1, 2010

Some news stories and links today.
Spamhaus has announced their new domain block list (DBL). The DBL is a list of domains that have been found in spam.

The DBL is managed as a “zero false-positive” list, safe to use by production mail systems to reject emails that are flagged by it. The DBL includes URIs (domains/hostnames) which are used in spam including phishing, fraud/”419″ or domains sending or hosting malware/viruses.
[…]DBL has a monitored automated self-service removal system.

There are more changes over at AOL. Annalivia has announced she is leaving AOL.  Anna has done an immense amount of work with senders over the years and her departure is definitely going to leave a hole. Drop by her website and wish her luck.

What this means to you: escalation paths and such are still being worked out, but the India Postmaster team and I have spent a lot of time working together in the last couple months; they’ll take care of you. The AOL postmaster website and reputation tool should also be useful. I’ll provide any further information as I get it.

Via Al Iverson, there’s a new informational source at anonwhois.org. This provides a list of domains registered behind privacy protection services.
Recently at MAAWG I had the opportunity to listen to a talk by Joseph Menn author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet. He was a very engaging and entertaining speaker who really seemed to understand the interplay between organized crime and spammers.

Taking permission
A very young industry

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News from MAAWG

During MAAWG a number of companies in the email space announce new initiatives, mergers, products and the like. This MAAWG is no different.
Spammers adjust to security trends. This is not really news, spammers have been adjusting to new security measures since folks started blocking from: addresses back in ’95 and ’96. The tactics are different and developing, but for every security hole that is blocked, spammers will search for another hole to exploit. The unfortunate truth is that end user is the weak point, and spammers and scammers are very very good at social engineering.
Spam statistics stalemate. Spam is still accounting for approximately 90% of all email traffic.
Cloudmark acquires Bizanga. I talked to some of the Cloudmark folks and they seem very excited with their acquisition of the Bizanga MTA and email technology.
Bizanga Storage announced. Bizanga Store is a scalable storage system brought to you by some of the people who were instrumental in building the Bizanga MTA acquired by Cloudmark.
ReturnPath announced partnership with RPost. Yet more ongoing changes in the certification field.

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Links for 1/15/10

A lot has happened this week.
Spammers and scammers are attempting to steal money from people attempting to donate money to those in earthquake devastated Haiti. A number of places, including CNN and CAUCE, are warning people who want to donate online to do so through trustworthy links. Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails nor on random websites.
AOL laid off most of their postmaster team. This is going to have a significant impact on sender support provided by AOL. The background chatter I’m hearing indicates that there is likely to be response delays of days to weeks for support tickets.
Pivotal Veracity was acquired by Unica, a marketing software company. Industry buzz says that PV will be run as a subsidiary and maintain their independent customer base.
Spamhaus launched a new website, which includes a link for a domain based URI blocklist. There’s not much information available about this new blocklist, but it’s likely to function similar to SURBL and URIBL.
The lethic botnet was penetrated and disabled. Dark Market, one of the large credit card number trading sites, was taken down and the proprietor arrested.

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FBI indicts 19 for internet related fraud

A federal grand jury in Dallas returned an indictment this week charging 19 individuals with conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. 15 of the defendants are charged with email fraud. All in all, these defendants are accused of defrauding various companies, from telcos to web developers, of $15,000,000.

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