Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else]

Wed Sep 12 16:13:00 UTC 2007

Hi All,

It seems to me reverse DNS just isn't an acceptable anti-spam measure.
Too many broken reverses exist with smaller companies (try getting a 3rd
party to fix it). It's not that hard for a bot to figure out a DSL's
reverse entry and use that for its HELO. And there are a lot more
effective pre-processing anti-spam measures, including greylisting (with
its own problems) and reputation-based systems. 

Best Regards,
Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Stephen Satchell
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2007 9:55 AM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else]

My mail servers return 5xx on NXDOMAIN.  If my little shop can spend not

too much money for three-9s reliability in the DNS servers, other shops 
can as well.  When I first deployed the system, the overwhelming 
majority of the rejects were from otherwise known spam locations 
(looking at Spamhaus, Spamcop, and a couple of other well-known DNSBLs).

  The number of false positives were so small that whitelisting was easy

and simple to maintain.

If a shop is not multihomed, they can contract with one or more DNS 
hosts to provide high-availability DNS, particularly for their 
in-addr.arpa zones.

It's not hard.  Nor expensive.

Paul Ferguson wrote:
> Re-sending due to Merit's minor outage.
> 
> - ferg
> 
> 
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> - -- Robert Blayzor <rblayzor at inoc.net> wrote:
> 
>> The fact that they're rejecting on a 5xx error based on no DNS PTR is
a=
> 
> bit harsh.  While I'm all for requiring all hosts to have valid PTR
> records, there are times when transient or problem servers can cause a
> DNS lookup failure or miss, etc.  If anything they should be returning
a=
> 
> 4xx to have the remote host"try again later".
> 
> Oh, wait till you realize that some of the HTTP returns are bogus
> altogether -- and actually still serve malware.
> 
> It's pretty rampant right now. :-/
> 
> - - ferg
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> 
> --
> "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
>  Engineering Architecture for the Internet
>  fergdawg(at)netzero.net
>  ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
> 
> 
> 
> 

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