Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes

Fri Oct 10 00:20:10 UTC 2003

--On Thursday, October 09, 2003 7:54 PM -0400 Susan Harris 
<srh at merit.edu> wrote:

>
> Folks, let's move this discussion onto one of the many lists that
> focuses on spam:
>
>   http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/spam-l.html -- spam-l list
> for        spam prevention and discussion
>   http://www.abuse.net/spamtools.html -- spam tools list for
> software        tools that detect spam
>   net.admin.net-abuse.email | net.admin.net-abuse.usenet -- usenet
> lists
>

I am curious as to why open proxies, compromised hosts, trojans and 
routing games are not considered operational issues simply because 
the vehicle being discussed is spam.

With all due respect, we have a *problem*. End user machines on 
broadband connections are being misconfigured and/or compromised in 
frightening numbers.  These machines are being used for everything 
from IRC flooder to spam engines, to DNS servers to massive DDoS 
infrastructure. If the ability of a teenager to launch a gb/s DDoS, 
or of someone DoSing mailservers off the internet with a trojan that 
contains a spam engine is not operational, perhaps it's just me 
that's confused.

Two-three years ago the warnings were ignored because it was only 
IRC. Now it's only spam.  What does it take to make the Network 
Operators and NANOG decide that things that are a "very bad thing" on 
one protocol generally can bite you later on another if you ignore it 
because it's only <insert your least favorite program or protocol 
here>?

-- 
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Margie Arbon                   Mail Abuse Prevention System, LLC
margie at mail-abuse.org          http://mail-abuse.org