more on new type of spam (or is there a better name for it)?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 11:13:28 -0500
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>
Subject: Re: [IP] new type of spam (or is there a better name for it)?
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

1. Typosquatting: spammers, and others, have been doing this for years.  See:

        Large-Scale Registration of Domains with Typographical Errors
        http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/typo-domains/

for much excellent analysis.  Or take a look at

        http://bulletproofmailing.com/

which is a spammer/typosquatting gang that's in the business of "harvesting"
all the mail traffic misdirected to the domains they're registered and
then selling the addresses to other spammers.

2. Please forgive my annoyance, which is not specifically directed at
anybody, but is more in the way of general frustration.

But...we keep hearing about "new forms of abuse" from various people
on IP and in other places.   They're not new.  They've been around for
years.  They've been pointed out over and over and over again by
people in the anti-abuse/anti-spam community.  Tens of thousands of
incidents have been documented (some in excruciating detail) and are
all available on the web/in mailing list archives/in newsgroup archives.

In fact, if you just go to:

        http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&group=news.admin.net-abuse.email

and start reading, you will find more of this than you could every possibly
hope to read.  And that's just one source.

I think the problem is that too many people have dismissed spam as
"merely a nuisance" for years and have ignored its connections to
all kinds of other abuse: typosquatting, relay hijacking, proxy hijacking,
network instrusion, money laundering, illegal gambling/drugs/porn, fake
"front" ISPs, "zombie" networks, mailbombing, "joe-jobs", and so on for
rather a long and depressing list.

Which is why, for example, when a well-organized, persistent DDoS attack
was launched against monkeys.com (precisely because it was a valuable
anti-spam resource) few noticed and even fewer paid attention.  I've
no doubt that if such an attack were launched against, say, Oracle, AOL,
Amazon or Microsoft that not only law enforcement become involved, they
would insist on doing so, and that it would be picked up by the news media.

But since monkeys.com is pretty much just one guy, nothing was done.

And its owner/operator, not possessing anything remotely close to the
resources of those other entities I named, was simply forced to shut it
down.  And so all the resources it provided, and the valuable research
it was disseminating, are gone.

But hey, spam's just a nuisance.  And we can all just hit delete.

---Rsk 

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/