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Nick, I thought at first that was the shortest message Matt
ever wrote... then I realized it was because he had the luxury of quoting
himself!
Andrew ;)
Well Matt when I read the link I was figuring you were fessing up
to how far off you were [are] on SPF - it was only until I read the end that I
understood to what you were referring. :)
-Nick
Matt
wrote:
Hmm, who would
have thunk?
Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] SPF Success
Date 12/24/2004
9:24 AM
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg22584.html
IMO,
the best way to stop forging is to stop zombie spammers. The way to
do this is FIRST implement port 587 as AUTH-only, and then widely block
port 25. This means that mail clients would exclusively use AUTH on
private networks and connect to their mail server on port 587 where only
AUTHed connections would be allowed. Then only servers would share
non-AUTH E-mail on port 25. The only reason why blocking port 25 is
not very common currently is because it is severely limiting to customers
and would cause support issues for the ISP. If you first did the
migration to port 587 AUTH-only connections, which would take several
years to accomplish in good order, ISP's could move forward with port 25
blocking and cause many fewer issues as far as support and their clients
were concerned.
Basically what I am saying is that forging isn't
the issue, it's spam zombies, and to go after it as a forging issue is to
miss the point. The big caveat here is that spammers will turn to
hacking AUTH in much larger numbers, and E-mail server software should
also widely implement a 'hijack' detection mechanism in order to help stem
the abuse. I have already noted much more hacking going on, first
with Earthlink's properties, and now with Prodigy as well. I have
little faith that these things will happen in the proper order or with the
expedience necessary unfortunately, especially because of what I consider
to be a distraction focused on forging coming from the likes of SPF,
Microsoft and Yahoo. I feel that the big players are missing the
point, and they are the ones that heavily influence E-mail client and
server software which is where the changes first need to be
implemented.
Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Question on SPF
Setup. Was under You **May** etc **May** etc
Date 6/30/2004 12:33
PM
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg19684.html
What
I do think would work much better in the near term would be for every mail
server to support and require SMTP AUTH through port 587 as proposed, and
then have every ISP out there block port 25 which would be used
exclusively for non-AUTH'ed E-mail between systems. That would cut
the zombie problem down dramatically without interrupting service, but
this will probably take 5 years or more to widely implement. I think
this would have a much larger effect than SPF in terms of blocking forging
E-mail, the majority of which comes from PC's attached to these
residential ISP's presently. AUTH hacking, or even server hacking
however will become much more predominant when the bar is raised in this
manner, but there should be many fewer machines to
track.
While this is certainly a bit of me patting
myself on my back, it is also a reminder to all that the worst is yet to
come and for the most part people are totally unprepared for this sort of
thing. So what's next? Maybe Geocities spam sent through hacked
Yahoo accounts??? Oh wait, that's already
happening.
Matt
Colbeck, Andrew wrote:
So, we've seen the recent SOBER variants used their own SMTP engine to
propagate as well as a predefined list of usernames and passwords at
ISPs to send themselves.
We've also seen that keeping viruses and spam out of our mailboxes is
easier when we can identify the sender as a zombie, and that it is
harder when the junk is coming from a valid ISP and/or user at an ISP.
http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?done=vlpolls_resp155596558
Well, Kaspersky is reporting that the latest SOBER is also stealing (at
least) Outlook usernames and passwords from infectees.
Therefore, we can reasonably expect more junk coming from AUTH'ed
senders.
Andrew.
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