Spam

I’ve read a number of articles over the past few days about the possible Android botnet and Yahoo! mail. No consensus yet but that’s not necessary to stop the spam at the server level, at least in my case. Of the spam I received so far, these characteristics stand out:

1. Only one of my mail accounts is receiving the spam. It’s not an account that usually receives spam. My long-time mail addresses that seem to have made it to most of the spam lists don’t get this spam. Makes me wonder where they picked up this address from.

Geez.

I’m feeling somewhat frustrated in dealing with an ISP that has a clearly compromised IP. I’ve been getting dictionary attacks on my mailserver for the past four days from the same IP. It’s assigned to a domain name. So I did what I normally do at first - let CSF (ConfigServer Security & Firewall - a fantastic free piece of software) handle it. The IP gets blocked for an hour. Usually, that’s all it takes for the attacker to go away and generally not come back. Not in this case. Four days into it, I decide to do an IP lookup and find out who it belongs to. So I find out the website URL and head over to it to see if I can find any contact information. I find a webmaster address, compose my e-mail telling them to check their server, that it’s probably compromised and that I’m blocking the IP permanently in my firewall. E-mail bounces - unknown address. So then I go to the contact form, fill that out and press send - page not found. Find another address and send an e-mail off to that address. Success. Notice that the web site doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2008 so I decide to do a whois and find out who the isp is. Send a message to the NOC. They send a message back and say report it to abuse. I forward my message to abuse and get the standard reply that you seem to get from abuse addresses - Sorry, but we get so much mail at abuse@whoever that we can’t respond personally to each one. If you’re writing about spam…blah, blah, blah.

I’ve just gone through a boatload of “pseudo”-spam. Pseudo-spam is what I call legitimate e-mail that, when using a vanilla installation of Spamassassin, is marked as spam solely through the e-mail creator’s carelessness, thoughtlessness, whatever adjective you want to use (I refrained from using stupidity although I desperately wanted to). This morning, 25% of the number of e-mails that were classified as spam were actually legitimate. After analyzing the Spamassassin rules that were triggered, many rules were needlessly fired. Had the creator taken the time to format the html properly, many of the rules wouldn’t have been triggered.