Re: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: another SOBERing though

[Darin Cox]

So the upshot of this is we need to   1. Figure out a way to enforce strong passwords for mail users   and   2. Monitor traffic for individual user accounts on an intra-day basis, perhaps even have a means of detecting sharp increases in traffic from a particular account and alerting an admin to investigate.  We do review a daily report the following morning of traffic by domain, but don't have anything in place to monitor by account, or to alert on an intra-day basis.   Something to look into... Darin.     ----- Original Message ----- From: Matt To: Declude.JunkMail@declude.com Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 6:18 PM Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: another SOBERing though Hmm, who would have thunk? Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] SPF Success Date 12/24/2004 9:24 AM http://www.mail-archive.com/declude.junkmail@declude.com/msg22584.html IMO, the best way to stop forging is to stop zombie spammers.  The way to do this is FIRST implement port 587 as AUTH-only, and then widely block port 25.  This means that mail clients would exclusively use AUTH on private networks and connect to their mail server on port 587 where only AUTHed connections would be allowed.  Then only servers would share non-AUTH E-mail on port 25.  The only reason why blocking port 25 is not very common currently is because it is severely limiting to customers and would cause support issues for the ISP.  If you first did the migration to port 587 AUTH-only connections, which would take several years to accomplish in good order, ISP's could move forward with port 25 blocking and cause many fewer issues as far as support and their clients were concerned. Basically what I am saying is that forging isn't the issue, it's spam zombies, and to go after it as a forging issue is to miss the point.  The big caveat here is that spammers will turn to hacking AUTH in much larger numbers, and E-mail server software should also widely implement a 'hijack' detection mechanism in order to help stem the abuse.  I have already noted much more hacking going on, first with Earthlink's properties, and now with Prodigy as well.  I have little faith that these things will happen in the proper order or with the expedience necessary unfortunately, especially because of what I consider to be a distraction focused on forging coming from the likes of SPF, Microsoft and Yahoo.  I feel that the big players are missing the point, and they are the ones that heavily influence E-mail client and server software which is where the changes first need to be implemented. Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Question on SPF Setup.  Was under You **May** etc **May** etc Date 6/30/2004 12:33 PM http://www.mail-archive.com/declude.junkmail@declude.com/msg19684.html What I do think would work much better in the near term would be for every mail server to support and require SMTP AUTH through port 587 as proposed, and then have every ISP out there block port 25 which would be used exclusively for non-AUTH'ed E-mail between systems.  That would cut the zombie problem down dramatically without interrupting service, but this will probably take 5 years or more to widely implement.  I think this would have a much larger effect than SPF in terms of blocking forging E-mail, the majority of which comes from PC's attached to these residential ISP's presently.  AUTH hacking, or even server hacking however will become much more predominant when the bar is raised in this manner, but there should be many fewer machines to track. While this is certainly a bit of me patting myself on my back, it is also a reminder to all that the worst is yet to come and for the most part people are totally unprepared for this sort of thing.  So what's next?  Maybe Geocities spam sent through hacked Yahoo accounts???  Oh wait, that's already happening. Matt Colbeck, Andrew wrote: So, we've seen the recent SOBER variants used their own SMTP engine to propagate as well as a predefined list of usernames and passwords at ISPs to send themselves. We've also seen that keeping viruses and spam out of our mailboxes is easier when we can identify the sender as a zombie, and that it is harder when the junk is coming from a valid ISP and/or user at an ISP. http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?done=vlpolls_resp155596558 Well, Kaspersky is reporting that the latest SOBER is also stealing (at least) Outlook usernames and passwords from infectees. Therefore, we can reasonably expect more junk coming from AUTH'ed senders. Andrew. --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.