CASL botnet take down

biohazardmailThe CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown. The warrant was to take down a C&C (command and control) server for Win32/Dorkbot. International efforts to take down C&C servers take a lot of effort and work and coordination. I’ve only ever heard stories from folks involved but the scale and work that goes into these take downs is amazing.
Bots are still a problem. Even if we manage to block 99% of the botnet mail out there people are still getting infected. Those infections spread and many of the newer bots steal passwords, banking credentials and other confidential information.
This kind of crime is hard to stop, though, because the internet makes it so easy to live in one country, have a business in a third, have a shell corp in a fourth, and have victims in none of those places. Law enforcement across the globe has had to work together and develop new protocols and new processes to make these kinds of takedowns work.
 

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Whirlwind that is M3AAWG

It’s been a great conference, and it’s only about half done. As is common at these conferences, I write down lots of things we should do and need to publish. The difference is now that we are growing I may have the time to put the polish on them and get them published.
Today’s keynote discussed the economics of botnet mitigation. Michel van Eeten from Delft University of Technology presented information compiled from some different datasets about botnets.
Good news
Botnet infection rates are relatively stable. They’ve not spiraled out of control like some people were predicting.
Interesting news
More than 50% of bot infections are contained on 50 ISPs in the entire world.
Bad news
Centers set up specifically to fix botnet infections don’t really have a big impact on infection cure rate.
Good news
ISP actions and walled gardens do have an impact on infection cure rates.
The biggest take away from the session is that ISPs are critical in both protecting from infection and helping users cure infection once it happens.

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Increase in CBL listings

Update: As of Nov 24, 2015 11:18 Pacific, Spamhaus has rebuilt the zone and removed the broken entries. Expect the new data to propagate in 10 – 15 minutes. Delivery should be back to normal.
The CBL issued a statement, which I reposted for readers that find this post in the future. I think it’s important to remember there is a lot of malicious traffic out there and that malicious traffic affects all of us, even if we never see it.
Original Post from 10am pacific on Nov 24
cbl-logo-2012
Mid-morning west coast time, I started seeing an uptick in reports from many ESPs and marketers that they were getting listed on the XBL/CBL. Listings mentioned the kelihos spambot.

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June 2015: the Month in Email

Happy July! We are back from another wonderful M3AAWG conference and enjoyed seeing many of you in Dublin. It’s always so great for us to connect with our friends, colleagues, and readers in person. I took a few notes on Michel van Eeten’s keynote on botnets, and congratulated our friend Rodney Joffe on winning the prestigious Mary Litynski Award.
In anti-spam news, June brought announcements of three ISP-initiated CAN-SPAM cases, as well as a significant fine leveled by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) against Porter Airlines. In other legal news, a UK case against Spamhaus has been settled, which continues the precedent we’ve observed that documenting a company’s practice of sending unsolicited email does not constitute libel.
In industry news, AOL started using Sender Score Certification, and Yahoo announced (and then implemented) a change to how they handle their Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL). Anyone have anything to report on how that’s working? We also noted that Google has discontinued the Google Apps for ISPs program, so we expect we might see some migration challenges along the way. I wrote a bit about some trends I’m seeing in how email programs are starting to use filtering technologies for email organization as well as fighting spam.
Steve, Josh and I all contributed some “best practices” posts this month on both technical issues and program management issues. Steve reminded us that what might seem like a universal celebration might not be a happy time for everyone, and marketers should consider more thoughtful strategies to respect that. I wrote a bit about privacy protection (and pointed to Al Iverson’s post on the topic), and Josh wrote about when senders should include a physical address, what PTR (or Reverse DNS) records are and how to use them, testing your opt-out process (do it regularly!), and advice on how to use images when many recipients view email with images blocked.

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