-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello We at the Coalition Against Unsolicited E-Mail ( CAUCE - http://www.cauce.org ) have recently formed a chapter in India. Briefly, CAUCE is a voluntary organization dedicated to fighting spam (unsolicited commercial / bulk email). We would like to give a short presentation (or request you people - especially the Bangalore Linux User Group) to focus on this at the IT.COM expo. India is a ticking time bomb - with a huge number of anonymous open relays (mostly outdated sendmail boxes, insecure Exchange / cc:Mail networks ...) ready and waiting for the first spammer to misuse them. - - From my participation in various anti spam groups, and my personal experience, India is, sadly, becoming a favourite hunting ground for spammers searching for open relay SMTP servers to relay their spam through. Recent examples include - - - --------------- [1] BARC - the most well documented case. MilW0rm used several well documented security holes in the ancient version of sendmail BARC was running to break in, delete mails etc etc. [2] tifr.res.in (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research)- SMI/SVR4, AIX 3.x etc boxes, recently hit by a spammer - leading to a server crash. The spammer has since been identified by a member of the SpamL mailing list [*] and I have passed this info to TIFR's syadmin for further action. [*] SpamL - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] is an anti spam list of mail admins / sysadmins of ISPs (like Earthlink / Digex / PSI) / backbone providers (UUNet) / Web hosts (Verio / Concentric etc) .... as well as ordinary users who are concerned about the spam problem. [3] kar.kar.nic.in (National Informatics Center, Bangalore) SMI/SVR4 box - hit by a spammer. and listed on an anti spam blacklist called the MAPS RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) <http://maps.vix.com/rbl/candidacy.html> which shut them off from over 40% of the Internet. They have now (after I pointed them to a few resources re this) upgraded their box to sendmail 8.9.3 and will shortly be delisted from the RBL. [3] giascla.vsnl.net.in - VSNL Calcutta - SMI/SVR4 box. No response from them yet (even after forwarding a copy with full headers) of the spam, info on how to close their open relays etc etc. [4] mailbg.vsnl.net.in - VSNL Bangalore. SMI/SVR4 or even older version of sendmail. No response yet - same as their colleagues in Calcutta. etc etc etc. In fact, a prominent Indian computer mag is running open relays I pointed this out to them (using the only listed address I have - ) several weeks ago. No response yet. - - ---------------- We would like to give a short presentation (or request you people - especially the Bangalore Linux User Group) to focus on this at the IT.COM expo. I hope you see the urgency of this problem and will help me (or rather the entire Internet community in India) in this matter. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.0.2 -- QDPGP 2.60 iQA+AwUBOBLqCJqQidQMDLaoEQIWFACYuoojEsv24fFO5PVZ43bag0rZswCgozR0 da1bURt1ZlMUE8n80YAPDmg= =tBMH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Smeagol Gollum | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | (aka) Suresh R. http://www.kcircle.com | http://www.angen.net/~pegasus/ Phone: +(91-40)3736553/3745398 | eFax: +(1-603)590-5437 Headline for the day: Two convicts evade noose - jury hung -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Linux India Mailing List Archives are now available. Please search the archive at http://lists.linux-india.org/ before posting your question to avoid repetition and save bandwidth.
