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Spam

Proxy Spam Compromise

Posted by garym on Mon, 06/30/2003 - 00:42

Here's a anti-spam tip that a colleague discovered on their server: If you run any kind of web proxy across your firewall, watch out for suspicious port values in POST request URI!

I had a http proxy running in port 8080, and somebody was doing HTTP POST requests to the SMTP port, clever!

200.90.100.80 - - [28/Jun/2003:10:34:19 +0000] "POST http://190.60.100.100:25/ HTTP/1.1" 00/ 2299

And it's just a little frightening; it's not the sort of thing you'd normally be on the look out for when nailing down the security of a system as you'd have to be monitoring your server logs pretty carefully to see it.

In this particular case, the proxy software was very quickly changed (yay Open Source!) to block requests to all but ports 80, 443 and anything above 1024 plus an exceptions list, but I wonder how many products out there have this same potential exploit? Yet another hard techie question that has to be put to the great sea of black-box  read more »

RCMP to 419: "Go ahead, make my day"

Posted by garym on Thu, 06/26/2003 - 16:36

The RCMP wants your Nigerian 419 spam:

Please forward Nigerian/African letters to wafl @ phonebusters.com ... The PNCC is very interested in receiving copies of any \'new\' versions of Nigerian letter scheme, particularly those involving Canadian mailing addresses or telephone numbers.

Phonebusters is hoping this valuable intelligence information will assist in targeting would be fraudsters. We're asked to send emails as forwarded messages or copy and paste the text and headers into a new message so as to reduce the risk of virus transmission.

The RCMP estimates Canadians have lost about $30 million to the scam over the last ten years and reports that about 10,000-15,000 letters pushing variations of this fraud from Nigeria have circulated in Canada.

[ Source: RCMP - Nigerian Letter Scam ]

ITAC on Spam

Posted by garym on Fri, 04/25/2003 - 16:28

The Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) has released the full text of their response to the Industry Canada Discussion Paper on Bulk Unsolicited Email. I'm happy to report that my Canadian colleagues have posted a reasoned reply ...

in a complex society, one person's spam is another's interesting offer. As long as a spam message does not contravene laws relating to fraud, hate, pornography and privacy protections, it will be difficult to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on something that may be annoying and tasteless – but is legal.

That said, ITAC proposes the most effective actions to be awareness and education; customers educated to take protective steps will make fewer calls to complain to their service providers and right there we could trim some of the flame-fest and panic costs associated with these emails, and they put the responsibility on the ISPs to ensure their services are not leveraged for spam.  read more »