Tracking the bad guys

Petri Helenius pete at he.iki.fi
Mon May 31 14:25:14 UTC 2004


Mike Tancsa wrote:

>
>   On a number of occasions, I watched in real time as a spammer nailed 
> up a connection to one of our infected users and started spamming out 
> via them.  I reported the info complete with tcpdumps of the entire 
> session to the large colo provider in the US with no response / 
> results.  Yes, it could just be yet another compromised computer, but 
> somehow I doubt it was.  The rwhois info did look rather suspicious 
> (PO box, phone # bogus, email contact bounced) and no public services 
> what so ever on the /28 allocated to the group of servers.  This was 
> back in the deep dark days of 2000-2001 when times were tough for many 
> such hosting companies and the temptation no doubt great to make a 
> quick buck.

There are quite a few hosting providers who specialize offering 
platforms for spammers and charge double or triple the going rate for 
hosting. As with other marginal products, if there is a market, there 
will be a seller at the right price.

And as stated previously, until the "big guys" start cutting these 
operations off their backbones instead of taking their money, hardly any 
real progress will happen.

Pete




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