Fake DNSBLs

Spamhaus recently announced a few years ago that they have discovered a company that is pirating various blocklists, relabeling them and selling access to them. Not only is the company distributing the zones, they’re also running a “pay to delist” scheme whereby senders are told if they pay money, they’ll be removed from the lists.
The fake company does remove the listing from the fake zones, but does nothing to remove the IP from the original sender. This company has been caught in the past and was blocked from downloading Spamhaus hosted zones in the past, but have apparently worked around the blocks and are continuing to pirate the zone data.
It’s not clear how many customers the blocklist has, although one ESP rep told me they were seeing bounces referencing nszones.com at some typo domains.
No legitimate DNSBL charges for delisting. While I, and other people, do consult for senders listed on the major blocklists, this is not a pay for removal. What I do is act as a mediator and translator, helping senders understand what they need to do to get delisted and communicating that back to the blocklist. I work with senders to identify good, clean addresses, bad address segments and then suggest appropriate ways to comply with the blocklist requirements.

Related Posts

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-2038.awsdns-62.co.uk for cbl.abuseat.org. No, I’m not going to tell you the IP address – if you can’t do a basic DNS query, you shouldn’t be modifying your hosts file and you can just wait a day.

Read More

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.

Read More

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 the world are seeing network slowdown because of this.
While I know that some of you may be cheering at the idea that Spamhaus is “paying” for their actions, this does not put you on the side of the good. Spamhaus’ actions are legal. The actions of the attackers are clearly illegal. Not only is the attack itself illegal, but many of the sites hosted by the purported source of the attacks provide criminal services.
By cheering for and supporting the attackers, you are supporting criminals.
Anyone who thinks that an appropriate response to a Spamhaus listing is an attack on the very structure of the Internet is one of the bad guys.
You can help, though. This attack is due to open DNS resolvers which are reflecting and amplifying traffic from the attackers. Talk to your IT group. Make sure your resolvers aren’t open and if they are, get them closed. The Open Resolver Project published its list of open resolvers in an effort to shut them down.
Here are some resources for the technical folks.
Open Resolver Project
Closing your resolver by Team Cymru
BCP 38 from the IETF
Ratelimiting DNS
News Articles (some linked above, some coming out after I posted this)
NY Times
BBC News
Cloudflare update
Spamhaus dDOS grows to Internet Threatening Size
Cyber-attack on Spamhaus slows down the internet
Cyberattack on anti-spam group Spamhaus has ripple effects
Biggest DDoS Attack Ever Hits Internet
Spamhaus accuses Cyberbunker of massive cyberattack

Read More