On Monday, April 12, 2004, 4:58:11 PM, Burnie Burnie wrote:
> (I also mentioned this on sa-users)

> Currently I get quite a few URIs which contains redirectors.
> I.e. http://drs.yahoo.com/incomplete/*http://spammer/address
>      http://g.msn.com/0US!s5.31472_315529/HP.1001?http://spammer/address

> AFAIK URIDNSBL.pm (and SpamCopURI) will not trigger on the
> spammers URI. - Even though the RBLs (mostly) will contain the
> URI/IP of http://spammer/address.

> Of course the above would be easy to parse to get the actual URIs, 
> but what about other redirectors where the actual URI must be
> looked up at the redirector itself? (Those who shortens the URI)

> Should we run lookups to known redirectors to get the actual URI?
> And how many times should we lookup, if the redirect is to
> (another) redirector?

Definitely a good question.  Ideally mail handlers like SA that
want to parse message body URIs should somehow resolve the
redirections.  I just wrote a little about the topic on sa-users
and my site:

  http://www.surbl.org/

> Regarding the handling of redirection sites:

> Redirection sites like drs.yahoo.com, tinyurl.com, etc. take
> external URIs (unfortunately including spam ones) and redirect
> a browser to them. Therefore spammers can use the redirectors
> to trick a simple URI check that only looks at the initial URI,
> making the whole URI appear legitimate. For example the Yahoo
> redirection below might be (incorrectly) parsed as a legitimate
> yahoo domain:
> 
> http://drs.yahoo.com/covey/parr/*http://spammer.address/
> 
> SpamCop itself seems to disambiguate (most of) the redirection.
> If someone is using a redirector to send traffic to
> spamdomain.com, SpamCop seems to detect and resolve it
> correctly to spamdomain.com most of the time. So the data
> that's used as input to sc.surbl.org already has redirectors
> correctly handled to some extent. In other words, we're
> protected on the data input side by this processing which
> happens at SpamCop to take out the redirection in reported
> URIs.  
> 
> The SA code using sc.surbl.org such as SpamCopURI and urirhdbl
> may or may not be as capable of detecting and resolving the
> redirections. I can't really say for sure because I have not
> reviewed that code. My focus is on more the data side of
> things. Certainly it would be useful of the code handling
> messages coming in from the wild were able to resolve
> redirections fully, but I'm not sure that's currently the case.
> (If they don't, then they won't match the ahem, "unredirected"
> ones with get into sc.surbl.org via SpamCop.)   
> 
> The big picture solution is for the redirection sites to block
> spam domains on their own. In other words, they should not let
> spammers rediect through their sites. Until they do so, their
> services can be abused by spammers. 

Jeff C.
-- 
Jeff Chan
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.surbl.org/

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