Spam

FTC Issues Statement on Whois Databases

A recent statement released by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission emphasized that the Whois databases should be kept "open, transparent, and accessible," allowing agencies like the FTC to protect consumers and consumers to protect themselves: "In short, if ICANN restricts the use of Whois data to technical purposes only, it will greatly impair the FTC's ability to identify Internet malefactors quickly -- and ultimately stop perpetrators of fraud, spam, and spyware from infecting consumers' computers," the statement states." more

Top 10 Spam Stories of 2008

Well, it's a yearly tradition in the western hemisphere that at the end of the year, we compose a top 10 list of the 10 most . Since it is now 2009, I thought that I would create my own list of the top 10 spam stories of 2008. Now, not all of these will be universally applicable to everyone, they are the top 10 stories as seen by me. more

WHOIS Review and Beyond 3.7.8

We have posted our support of the WHOIS Policy Review Team Report with two important comments. First, on page 79 of the report it is confirmed that the RAA is unenforceable on WHOIS inaccuracy (we wrote about this while at the last ICANN meeting) because the language of RAA 3.7.8 has no enforcement provision. It is now time for ICANN to confirm this problem officially.  more

Put Security Alongside .XXX

Isn't security as important to discuss as .XSS? The DNS has become an abuse infrastructure, it is no longer just a functional infrastructure. It is not being used by malware, phishing and other Bad Things [TM], it facilitates them. Operational needs require the policy and governance folks to start taking notice. It's high time security got where it needs to be on the agenda, not just because it is important to consider security, but rather because lack of security controls made it a necessity. more

Comcast Fires Back at E360

Back in January, bulk mailer E360 filed a suit against giant cable ISP Comcast. This week Comcast responded with a withering response... Their memorandum of law wastes no time getting down to business: "Plaintiff is a spammer who refers to itself as a "internet marketing company," and is in the business of sending email solicitations and advertisements to millions of Internet users, including many of Comcast's subscribers." Comcast's analysis is similar to but even stronger than the one I made in January... more

Users Don’t Like Forwarded Spam

A message on Dave Farber's Interesting People list complained that Comcast was blocking mail forwarded by DynDNS, a popular provider of DNS and related services for small-scale users... Actually, they're blocking it because a lot of it is spam. This is a problem that every mail forwarder and every mail system encounters; the only unusual thing here is that DynDNS is whining about it. It's yet another way that spammers have broken the mail for the rest of us. more

IP Blocklists, Email, and IPv6

Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and elsewhere have been debating how to handle e-mail-server blocklists in an IPv6 network. Let's take a look at the problem here. We basically have three ways to address spam, in our goal of reducing the amount of spam in our inboxes... more

A Few Thoughts on the Future of Email Authentication

With the Online Trust Alliance Town Hall Meeting and Email Authentication Roundtable next week as well as the RSA Conference, I decided to pause and think about where we are and where we might be headed with regard to email authentication. Over the years, many of us have collectively worked to provide a framework for authenticating email... more

IP Address Reputation Primer

There has been a lot of recent discussions and questions about reputation, content and delivery of email. I started to answer some of them, and then realized there weren't any basic reference documents I could refer to when explaining the interaction. So I decided to write some. This post is about IP address reputation with some background on why IPs are so important and why ISPs focus so heavily on the sending IP. more

False Positives and Ignorance

Content inspection is a poor way to recognise spam, and the proliferation of image spam recently drums this home. However if one must use these unreliable techniques, one should bring mathematical rigour to the procedure. Tools like SpamAssassin combine content inspection results, with other tests, in order to tune rule-sets to give acceptable rates of false positives (mistaking genuine emails for spam), and thus end up assigning suitable weights to different content rules. If one is going to use these approaches to filtering spam, and some see it as inevitable, one better know one's statistics... more

News from the Authentication Summit in NYC

At The Email Authentication Implementation Summit in New York City last week, several major ISPs surprised attendees with their announcement that they are jointly backing a single authentication standard. Yahoo!, Cisco, EarthLink, AOL, and Microsoft got together and announced they are submitting a new authentication solution, DomainKeys Identified Mail to the Internet Engineering Task Force for approval as a standard. This is big news... more

Opt-In Permission for Mailing Lists: Is It Enough?

For some time now I have contended that Confirmed Opt-in, 'COI' is dead, or at the very least on life support. It certainly is not a major factor in the continued relation between sender and receiver; that relies far more heavily on the ongoing and historical reputation of the mailer and the mail stream. Proof of permission doesn't scale; end-users complain all the time, but it is rare if not impossible for a receiving site to request proof when an end-user complains, then the receiver complains to the sender, and the sender says that permission was actually in place. Much more commonly, the sender unsubscribes the address and moves on, permission or not, since the subscriber doesn't want the mail any more. But then, I recently had two eye-opening experiences... more

Catching Spam Email with Project Honey Pot

Since its launch in October, 2004 Project Honey Pot has made some interesting progress in their war against spam email. The project is a distributed system used to identify spammers and spambots operating across the Internet. To put it simply, Project Honey Pot lays millions of traps around the Internet (66,393,293 as of this writing) baited with specific email addresses that are configured to forward received emails to the Project Honey Pot system. Since these are not email addresses used by real individuals virtually every email received is positively identified as spam. more

What the ITU WSIS Spam Meeting Accomplished

The first week in July I went to an acronym-heavy World Symposium on the Internet Society Thematic Meeting on spam in Geneva. A few people have reported this as a meeting by "the UN", which it wasn't. Although the International Telecommunications Union is now part of the UN, it dates back to an 1865 treaty to manage international telegraph communication... more

Are Botnets Run by Spy Agencies?

A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I've been asking for the last year. Are some of the world's botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not? Some estimates suggest that up to 1/3 of PCs are secretly part of a botnet. The main use of botnets is sending spam, but they are also used for DDOS extortion attacks and presumably other nasty things like identity theft. But consider this... more