ArchiveMarch 2013

Post-mortem on the Spamhaus DOS

There’s been a ton of press over the last week on the denial of service attack on Spamhaus. A lot of it has been overly excited and exaggerated, probably in an effort to generate clicks and ad revenue at the relevant websites. But we’re starting to see the security and network experts talk about the attack, it’s effects and what it tells us about future attacks. I posted an...

Internet Storm Center on the Spamhaus DOS

The Internet Storm Center (ISC) has a blog post up discussing the DOS attack against Spamhaus. They do confirm they saw traffic approaching 300Gbps against Spamhaus. They also point out that most people probably never knew. The attack was significant, but not globally so despite the media reports to the contrary. When news of the attack reached the Internet Storm Center, we did have a brief...

More on the attack against Spamhaus and how you can help

While much of the attack against Spamhaus has been mitigated and their services and websites are currently up, the attack is still ongoing.  This is the biggest denial of service attack in history, with as much as 300 gigabits per second hitting Spamhaus servers and their upstream links. This traffic is so massive, that it’s actually affecting the Internet and web surfers in some parts of...

Some content is just bad; but it doesn't have to be

There are a few segments in the marketing industry that seem to acquire senders with bad mailing practices. Nutraceuticals, male performance enhancing drugs, short term or payday loans and gambling have a lot of senders that treat permission as optional. The content and the industry themselves have garnered a bad reputation. This makes these industries extremely difficult for mailers who actually...

Questioning standards

M3AAWG publishes documents summarizing and discussing current practices for stopping and preventing abuse. Some of these documents are focused on ISPs while others are focused on marketers. While M3AAWG is not directly nor officially a standards body, most of the documents have been written by members and reflect the best current practices for that document. Members have been asked to leave the...

Spamhaus answers questions

Lost in all of the DOS attack news this week is that the first installment of Spamhaus answering questions from marketers in Ken Magill’s newsletter. It’s well worth a read for anyone who is interested in hearing directly from Spamhaus. One quote stood out for me, and it really sums up how I try to work with clients and their email programs. Playing evasion games to avoid traps is...

CBL website and email back on line

The CBL website is back on line. It’s possible that your local DNS resolver has old values for it cached. If so, and if you can’t flush your local DNS cache, and you really can’t wait until DNS has been updated then you may be able to put a temporary entry in your hosts file to point to cbl.abuseat.org. You can get the IP address you need to add by querying the nameserver at ns...

dDOS spreads to the CBL

Spamhaus has mostly mitigated the dDOS against the Spamhaus website and mailserver, but now the CBL is under attack. They have been working to get that under protection as well, but it’s taking some time. Right now there are no public channels for delisting from the CBL. The Spamhaus Blog will be updated as things change, and I’ll try and keep things updated here as well. UPDATE:...

Mail that looks good on desktop and mobile

Over the weekend I noticed a new CSS framework aimed at email rather than web development, “Antwort“. This isn’t the first or only framework for email content, but this one looks simple and robust, and it allows for content that doesn’t just adapt for different sized displays but looks good on all of them. The idea behind it is to divide your content into columns, magazine...

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Us