> I know more email admins repulsed by RBLs than I know spammers, so > I'm open to many possibilities.
As an honest guy, you wouldn't be expected to know more spammers than legit admins, so that's not statistically valid! Are the admins you know sufficiently criminally minded, confident, connected, and skilled to mount a DDoS attack? Note that the DNS-based blacklists that have been taken down of late weren't exactly cutting-edge: MONKEYS wasn't the enemy of a legit-hearted and technically skilled sysadmin; with the exception of the cross-posted OSSRC (which could hardly have been the main target, since it carried as much harm for the people who used it exclusively as for those listed), OsiruSoft wasn't a champion of collateral damage. No, I think you're taking a grand leap of logic. Spammers, whose income is proportional to their ability to get spam delivered (and thus acted upon), are far more direly threatened by public blacklists than full-time sysadmins of legit servers. But it's not just a qualitative question of how deeply one's ox is gored, but also a binary one: who's going to go over to the other side vs. who's already *on* the other side? So your server was accidentally blacklisted for false positives, and you're justly fit to be tied, but mounting a DDoS? You didn't have a PTR, so you're going to commit a criminal act? Your employer is using a provider that derives huge revenue from spammers, and is therefore blacklisted by association, so you decide to mount an attack that could land you in jail instead of getting another provider? Your legit webmail business is going under because you didn't actively police your traffic as the spam problem grew, so you're going to spend your last dime and time taking this out on the blacklists, rather than realizing that your business model was not sustainable? Look, I've gone on record against collateral blacklisting, as I know there can be substantial business impact that will be blamed on techies, but--maybe this is just hopeful me--I can't believe there's *yet* been enough outright loss of income or position to explain attacks like this being conducted by formerly legitimate IT professionals. I think you're dealing with contract hackers, probably non-US in origin, hired by a consortium of spammers. You could be right, but I'd bet against you. > And NEVER underestimate a kid in his basement. I'd hope there aren't many kiddies who find room in the "hacker's creed" for DDoSing anti-spam blacklists. If there are, they're not growing them like they used to. :) And a kiddy who's directly employed by spammers is no longer an experimenting white hat. -Sandy ------------------------------------ Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist Broadleaf Systems, a division of Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
