nanog mailing list archives

Re: An end to spam through Graphnet


From: DAVE NORDLUND <nordlund () ccstaff cc ukans edu>
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 1997 12:41:09 CST-600

Date:          Fri, 01 Aug 1997 14:32:34 -0700 (PDT)
From:          Geoff White <geoffw () precipice v-site net>
Subject:       Re: An end to spam through Graphnet
To:            Dana Hudes <dhudes () graphnet com>
Cc:            nanog () merit edu



On Fri, 1 Aug 1997, Dana Hudes wrote:

Hi folks,
Some time back before the latest round of cable cuts and BIND
arguments
you may recall that I notified everyone that Graphnet was being
abused to
transit spam. An ugly mess -- between the bounces and the flood
of 'remove' from

yeah,
      I got hit the other day.


We have put an end to this madness on our systems by building and
configuring the very latest Sendmail v8 and BIND 4.9.6 (attempts
to use v8 failed for being too Berkley,
on a Solaris 2.x system -- but don't start arguing that here
please) in combination with
filters on our gateway router. Load has dropped way down on our
sparc20, and hopefully the spammers will go play with someone
else instead of futilely occupying bandwidth on our circuits .

Let this be an object lesson to those of you out there who have
yet to upgrade:
the spammers will find you sooner or later. They walk down every
A record in every zone until they find a victim. They look in
public databases like RIPE to see what mailboxes are registered
for the zone and they use those names to try to get past your
sendmail filters and launch spam in your name (doesn't work on
us, I thought of that trick).
So go forth to www.isc.org and www.sendmail.org and compile.


Can anyone elaborate a little more on the "one true" set of procedures
that one should take to prevent spammers from abusing ones resources.

The current problem that I have is valid customers who are "on the road"
and want to sendmail through my SMTP server when they dial into 
att or netcom, before their eudora's used to point their SMTP server
at me, that ain't happenin' after my spam attach so is there some work
around that they can use?

Just get your customers to use an Email client that knows how to use MX
records and does not need a "forwarder"!  Frontier Technologies sells the
Super TCP/NFS suite with an Email client that works just fine.  It even
has internal IDs and Passwords so that more than one person (or you if
you have to look like more than one person) can use the same machine.
   www.frontiertech.com







Dave Nordlund               d-nordlund () ukans edu
University of Kansas        913/864-0450
Computing Services          FAX 913/864-0485
Lawrence, KS  66045         KANREN


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