24hrs later
Why do you keep getting stories so long after everyone else. This was on the BBC last night and in every newspaper this morning. I can see you have an office in London, so its not like you're not exposed to this.
A British police investigation into the massive DDoS attack against internet watchdog Spamhaus has led to the arrest of a 16-year-old London schoolboy who, it is claimed, is part of an international gang of cyber-crooks. "The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums …
"Cyberbunker denied responsibility and claimed Spamhaus was acting as a internet vigilante"
Quel surprise ! Another example of the accuser being the perpetrator as well. You don't really need spies and hacking to find out what people are up to, all you have to do is pay attention to what they are accusing others of. That said Snowden's efforts still sprung a few surprises despite the US establishment's frenzied leaking via accusation. :)
I reckon it's the misguided Dutch connection at it again.
If you recall recently, some Dutch mob got shitlisted for peering a spam sewer. Unfortunately said sewer also happened to host servers for a well-known torrent site that's the darling of the dafter hacktivists and said Dutch mob promptly went apeshit in self-righteous indignation, carefully ignoring the hard evidence and going for the conspiracy.
Spamhaus are still getting the fallout from doing their job perfectly: Identifying crapholes and blacklisting them, regardless of whoever might be on their side, be it cybercrime lords or the well-meaning idiots of "teh internets police".
My heart just pumps purple piss for these nazi anti-spam organizations. I hate Spam, but these blacklisting organizations are a classic example of the cure that's worse than the disease.
Yes, they blacklist spammers, but also entire networks of innocent web servers in datacenters that want to do nothing but let people get their forum registration/notification emails and the like. I've been on the receiving end of that crap too many times with servers I have been charged with setting up and looking after.
I've written to many an ISP mail administrator to get the IP addresses of the good netizens in my care whitelisted, but these block list organizations that are run by tribunals of power tripping idiots are a different story.
I nearly cheered when SPEWS was DOS'ed out of existence. I certainly don't cheer for spamming and DOS attacks, but when SPEWS went away, so did my problems.
I run my own mail from my own domain, on a server in a good datacenter. I've enjoyed trouble free mail for several years now, my domain has a good reputation, my hosting provider has a good reputation (no tolerance for spam) and I'm not on any of these blacklists. The only problem I have (recently) is fucking Microsoft. I can't send to hotmail/outlook.com/live accounts, nor any ISP mail that outsources their mail to Microsoft (e.g. Bell in Canada).because my IP network is in their own blocklists. There's no recourse, no admin contact to get whitelisted... nothing but a FAQ that I (or the "ISP" I am supposed to contact about the problem) must conform to. This isn't something the users can add to their "safe senders" lists either, because it never even gets to them.
So tell me folks, how many times are email communications thwarted by these creeps? How does that make you feel, that email is unreliable? You send someone a message, and you have no guarantee that they will ever get it. You're waiting for a message to confirm registration to subscribe to some service, or obtain a license key for something you bought and it never comes. There's a good chance that you can thank blocklist zealots like these.
Seems your problem is with Microsoft not Spamhaus. Microsoft/Hotmail have a bad reputation for sending incoming email to the Microsoft equivalent of /dev/null with nary a DSN, regardless of the SPF match between envelope Mail from address and SMTP client IP. So say my SMTP logs when my users have complained about messages not getting through. But you need to bear in mind with "free" services such as Hotmail, that the users are not the customers, they are the commodity being harvested and sold to advertisers and for other ethically-challenged purposes.
Best thing I can suggest is advise your users with Hotmail addresses not to use these for anything where delivery matters, e.g. sending out job apps. Pretty stupid to send one of these from a Hotmail address anyway regardless of the postman dumping your incoming mail in a drain, due to the lower than average IQ impression given by many Hotmail users.
Yes, I didn't mean to imply (nor did I) that it had anything to do with Spamhaus. My server's IP network is not on any known blocklists except at Microsoft. It was only related as part of the rant about this kind of blocking in general, another example of spam blocking foolishness.
I was actually talking about my personal and business email (I provide mail services for my family too, my mother uses it for business dealings as well) I cannot reply to anyone on Hotmail. I could very easily say "fuck hotmail" (I couldn't count the number of times I have) but what's worse is, Bell provides their customers with rebranded "hotmail" accounts for their bell.net and sympatico.com email addresses (accessed through POP3 mail clients, using SSL or through webmail). I can't reply to any users (existing or potential customers) on probably the biggest "ISP" (also phone company and provider of highly annoying satellite television) in Canada because of those twats.
I was also talking about Spamhaus and other blocklist problems I had on other servers that I looked after. These servers had forums and things using email confirmation, and email notifications etc.
Not a friend of spam but not a friend of Spamhaus either, having been bitten by their enthusiastic policies which are on the level of Team Amurrica and the Centre for the Propagation of Democracy in the Middle East before.
A good read:
Cyberbunker account of the blacklist event
A2B account of the blacklist event
Spamhaus account of the blacklist event
Unrelated but at least Cyberbunker is funny:
Cyberbunker raided by SWAT team
I feel I'm gonna host with those guys.
Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox removed from RIPE Anti-Abuse Working Group, 18 November 2010:
James Blessing, concerned Internet citizen, said he noticed that Co-Chair Richard Cox tends often not to be present at RIPE Meetings or not involved, unless it is to be hostile towards RIPE itself. He asked if Richard was the correct person to be working group co-chair.
Working Group Co-Chair Brian Nisbet said he contacted Richard and asked him to respond to comments that had been made, but Brian had not heard back from Richard in relation to this.
Jim Reid, Internet citizen, said this was a delicate issue, and even if the co-chair of a working group was critical of RIPE, that is not necessarily a bad thing. He said, however, that his opinion was that Richard crossed a line insofar as his comments were unfair and unjustified, and he confused RIPE with the RIPE NCC in his comments, which is not helpful. He said Richard’s comments unfairly damaged the reputation of RIPE, the RIPE NCC and the Anti-Abuse Working Group.
Rob Blokzijl, RIPE Chair, noted that this is the first time there has been a situation like this in the history of RIPE. Rob noted that the RIPE Chair, the Chairman of the RIPE NCC Executive Board and the RIPE NCC Managing Director met with Richard where they tried to clear up some misunderstandings. He said all three who met with Richard are disappointed that the outcome of this meeting, where they thought issues had been cleared up, were not reflected in subsequent posts from Richard that were published on websites. He said he felt that if you were elected to chair a working group by the RIPE community then you had a responsibility to that community and to its secretariat, the RIPE NCC. He concluded that it would be better for the community if Richard would step down so it would be clear that when he spoke he was speaking for himself and not the RIPE community.
....
Brian said he had discussed the matter with Rob prior to the working group session and they agreed that the working group had the authority to appoint its co-chairs and, therefore, to remove them. Brian asked if anyone was willing to stand up and object to Richard Cox being removed as Co-Chair of the Anti-Abuse Working Group. As nobody took this action, Brian declared that consensus had been reached. He said that he would require a new co-chair and he expressed his wishes that one could be in place by the RIPE 62 Meeting.
Microsoft's E-Mail is unreliable. Film at 11.
But seriously, on the one hand, I think these services provided a very important service, the spammers were absolutely out of control. Collateral damage? Don't use an ISP or hosting provider that tolerates spammer. I feel for those who have some overzealous local ISP arbitrarily blacklist you.
On the other hand, I personally use NO blacklists, getting all spam helps my Bayesian filter train better so it can effectively block the spam (as opposed to only training off whatever spam makes it past a blacklist.) The blacklist now is not enough, one must use a Bayesian filter anyway to effectively block enough spam; so personally, I decided to ditch the blacklist, and I think if I ran an ISP I'd also ditch the blocklist and just let the spam filter crunch a bit extra.
Oh on topic for the article -- I'm glad this kid got arrested and hope he gets the book thrown at him. By all appearances, he was working for hire for greasy greasy spammers. Spammers and those who help them can piss right off.