Ken Magill wrote about Spamhaus last week. In the article he commented about the volunteers. By most accounts, the folks responsible for maintaining Spamhaus’s blacklists can be a very annoying group to deal with—mainly because they’re faceless and unforgiving. Today, Ken published a response from Steve Linford, the head of Spamhaus. The response is well worth a read and I encourage you to head...
A number of ESPs are reporting an increase in SBL listings of big, well known brands. InterestingSBLs seems to confirm this. Just on the month of June I see tweets reporting SBL listings for: Disney (again, and again) AAA Michigan, NRCC, the Mitt Romney campaign, Macy’s (again) Facebook, Walmart Brazil, Safeway, Bacardi. What happened? I think there are a number of reasons for an increase...
There are a lot of people who abuse online services and use online services to abuse and harass other people. But handling complaints and handling the abuse are often afterthoughts for many new companies. They don’t think about how to accept and process complaints until they show up. Nor do they think about how bad people can abuse a system before hand. But dealing with complaints is...
Spamhaus announced today they are publishing two new BGP feeds: Extended DROP and the Botnet C&C list. These lists are intended for use inside routers in order to stop all traffic to or from listed IP addresses. This is a great way to impact botnet traffic and hopefully will have a significant impact on virus infections and botnet traffic. In other news I’ve been hearing rumbling about...
Often clients come to me looking for help “removing spamtraps from their list.” They approach me because they’ve found my blog posts, or because they’ve been recommended by their ISP or ESP or because they found my name on Spamhaus’ website. Generally, their first question is: can you tell us the spamtrap addresses on our lists so we can remove them? My answer is...
Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools. Is their increased vigilance pissing you off? If so, your anger is misplaced. They are reacting quite sensibly to market conditions...
Yesterday law enforcement officials arrested 6 people and charged them with running a massive internet fraud ring. Over 4 million PCs were part of the botnet. According to the FBI the cyber ring used a class of malware called DNSChanger to infect approximately 4 million computers in more than 100 countries. There were about 500,000 infections in the U.S., including computers belonging to...
Today (well, actually tomorrow, but only because New Zealand is on the other side of the date line) the NZ Department of Internal Affairs added a 3rd statement of claim against Brendan Battles and IMG Marketing. This third claim brings the total possible fines to $2.1 million. Brendan is a long term spammer, who used to be in the US and moved to New Zealand in 2006. His presence in Auckland was...
On August 30, 2007 I wrote my very first blog post: 7th Circuit court ruling in e360 v. Spamhaus. Today, 4 years later (almost to the day) that case may finally be over. After a bench trial on the issue, the district court awarded e360 a mere $27,002, a far cry from the millions of dollars that e360 sought. Both parties have appealed. We conclude that the district court properly struck most of...
URL shorteners, like bit.ly, moby.to and tinyurl.com, do three things: Make a URL shorter Track clicks on the URL Hide the destination URL Making URLs shorter was their original role, and it’s why they’re so common in media where the raw URL is visible to the recipient – instant messaging, twitter and other microblogs, and in plain text email where the “real” URL...
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