-- more on -- Spammers declare war on spam blockers?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 06:24:43 +0530
> From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh () hserus net>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Spammers declare war on spam blockers?
> To: dave () farber net
> Cc: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>,
>    Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
>
>
> Dave Farber [8/29/2003 2:25 AM] :
>
> > > Saboteurs hit spam's blockers
> > > http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/08/28/saboteurs_hit_spams_bl 
> > >
> > > ockers/
>
> This has been going on for months now.
>
> Alternatives for blocklists to stay up and remain available in the face of 
> repeated, crippling DDoS attacks could be setting them up on multiple 
> redundant mirrors on fat pipes that can withstand DDoS better than a DSL, 
> on which Jared had been running Osirusoft for over a year.
>
> Other steps to try out could be anycast (being kicked around on nanog), or 
> moving the architecture to a more distributed framework (usenet, p2p 
> networks, or something similar).
>
> Osirusoft going down that way was a shock for a huge number of mail admins 
> worldwide who had come to rely on it for their filters.  But luckily, it 
> is basically an aggregator of several DNSBL zones that are available from 
> elsewhere, and there is a way to work around its loss.
>
> For example, we have this policy of getting dnsbls that we use direct from 
> the source (say flat text copies of sbl and spews.org available from their 
> respective websites and a wide variety of mirrors) rather than using an 
> intermediary zone like Osirusoft.  We then combine these blocklists with 
> IPs that we block locally, and serve the lot to our mailservers using Dan 
> Bernstein's rbldns (http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/rbldns.html) - so we 
> effectively run our own internal blocklist zone.
>
> Something like this will definitely help mail admins keep their users from 
> being inundated with spam after being forced to turn off all their 
> blocklists because the blocklists either shut down completely, or are 
> answering queries at a very slow rate because they are being DDoS'd.
>
>         srs

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