Subject: [Asrg] 0.General - News Articles

From: Andreas Saurwein <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 02:09:19 -0200

EC draws line in spam sand
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/35320.html

Worldwide Help Needed to Stop Spam
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114587,00.asp

Thats more the kind of spirit we need now.

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From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 15:11:49 -0500

> Thats more the kind of spirit we need now.

What always amazes me is how much the politicians are willing to talk 
about the problem, but not too many are willing to give cold hard cash 
to law enforcement agencies. The FTC in the US estimates that over 70% 
of spam is fraudulent and can be enforced under existing laws. Yes, 
Congress has not given extra money to do so.

Yakov
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Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord 
Acton)
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From: Harry Tabak <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 17:57:59 -0500

Yakov Shafranovich wrote:

<snip>
> Congress has not given extra money to do so.

Unfortunately, as has been frequently discussed, evil spammers seem to 
dominate bulk commercial email.  They hide behind zombie proxies and use 
underground networks to spew their garbage. Therefore zombies are a 
mechanism that needs to be curtail first and this is an enforcement 
issue, not a government policy issye. The need is for someone (who?) to 
track zombies and then get ISP's to block. This is a difficult chore.

My own personal experiences and data collected at my SMTP server, 
confirm the severity of the zombie issue. While, I recognize my 
experiences are not necessarily universal, more general data is hard to 
find. This is what I've found at my site.

1. Installing a homebrewed simple greylist filter dropped my spam rate 
from about 65/day to 7-8/day and gave me the ability to gather some 
stats.  I'll accept mail from anyone who will retry with the same IP 
address after two minutes of rejection.

2. In the last fourteen days I was visited by 4312 grey listed hosts. 
3864 made just one attempt at delivery and when rejected, they never 
came back (using that IP address). Apparently, retries where attempted, 
but new IP addresses were used. The 3864 unique attempts came in 818 
batches (tries in less than one minute) with an average of 4.7 attempts 
per each batch.

3. The cost, to spammers, of a failed delivery must be cheaper than the 
cost of pruning a mailing list. The stats remained relatively stable 
even after 40 days of graylisting.

Harry Tabak
Quad Telecom, Inc.