On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 3:54 PM Jim Fenton <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> I’m not an ESP, of course, but it seems like they need to do more vetting
> of new customers (like perhaps manually reviewing their mailings) until
> they are convinced those new customers are good actors. I realize this is
> an expensive thing to do, but the ESPs are, after all, loaning their good
> email reputation to their customers and they need to protect that. Because
> of relays, this needs to be done even if those customers appear to be
> sending to a relatively small list of recipients.
>

As pointed out in another response, the amplification factor of replays
means that signup anti-spam systems which are 99% effective are not good
enough; even manual review is imperfect at scale. All it takes is a single
malicious account to get through review, and you can have millions of
replays happening.

Responding more generally to some of the other questions about the
structure of these messages/attacks, and why various proposed detection
methods aren't useful:

- SPF? They just change the MFROM, that can't be signed; no mechanism
exists that enforces DKIM d= and MFROM domain alignment, and a significant
amount of legitimate mail does not align between those two domains, so
that's not a useful reputation identifier.
- DMARC? Attacker controls the From domain, or uses a shared domain with no
DMARC record or with a p=none record.
- DNSBLs? Most DNSBLs don't have spamtrap representation at large consumer
mailbox providers, so they're blind to this spam.
- Limited ipv4 space? You can find a lot of non-sequential, clean enough
IPs if you spend time and effort on it. (And they do.)
- Large sets of RCPT TOs? Attackers replay messages individually instead,
just like legitimate high volume email delivery systems.
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