Spammers' New Tactic Upends DNS

Yahoo! News ^ | 9 January 2005 | Dennis Fisher

[KoRn]

"Well, logic dictates that you must be wrong i.e. that there must in fact be people who are buying this stuff, or else the spammers wouldn't waste their time, but I don't know."

You are correct, however, it costs virtually nothing to spam, and if you can just just a couple of suckers out of a few hundred messages sent you can make your money back, and then some. That's not even speaking of the money they get from selling the data they collect by installing the spyware on people's machines.

[Snardius]

Tax all spam and advertisements.

Sets a bad precedent and opens the door for taxation of the internet. Otherwise it's a great idea.

If you want less of it tax it. If you want more of it subsidize it.

[Wheee The People]

Very true, but the risks are far higher

I don't think there are any risks at all. The Can-Spam act hasn't reduced spam. Any spammer worth his/her salt can use an off-shore server.

[general_re]

Ideally, you would have an email filtering bastion host (email relay server) that would locally store the current DNS table. That way it could locally check the emails for a valid dns name prior to passing on to the internal email server.

And what happens in the case of new domains that have been legitimately registered, or old domains that have expired out of your local DNS cache? Your DNS box then has to go outside the LAN to do a lookup itself, and you're right back to square one.

[Snardius]

Any spammer worth his/her salt ...

Every spammer isn't worth the crap their filled with.

[isthisnickcool]

I'm sure there are some people that get excited when Arumbi Omigiggio, the ex-minister for domestic compliance in Nigeria notifies them they will soon have access to millions of dollars. With all that new money they buy breast implants, pop some Viagra and get their pee-pee to grow using special herbs.

[frog_jerk_2004]

A DNS that hasn't been registered, but receives thousands of queries, should be identified and permanently locked out. Permanently.

Mail servers will need to be able to check against this situation and increase their local negative cache timeout for said domain. These domains should then be distributed to multiple DNS blacklists and only proper petitioning and authorization can lift the ban.

[taxcontrol]

No, because the DNS table would be updated once per day. Your table would no older than 24 hrs. I a business comes into being 12 hrs ago, I'm not sure I would want to be receiving emails from them in the first place.

Second, it would be one query daily instead of a constant set of queries.

[frog_jerk_2004]

I'm sure there are some people that get excited when Arumbi Omigiggio, the ex-minister for domestic compliance in Nigeria notifies them they will soon have access to millions of dollars. With all that new money they buy breast implants, pop some Viagra and get their pee-pee to grow using special herbs.

You forgot Arumbi Omigiggio also has gone through all of the trouble and approved your mortgage of up to 400K without any of your information. He has been waiting for a call back from you for 3 days and is getting worried...

[Wheee The People]

My 80 year old mother got some spam that she had won $500 at an online casino. ~sigh. She went there like a bat out of hell, gave 'em all kinds of info and now her emails are full of spam.

[Mannaggia l'America]

To effectively end spam, just make it legal to beat the living snot out of the spammers.

And anyone who buys anything advertised through spam.

If no one made any money via spam, there would be no spam!

[general_re]

No, because the DNS table would be updated once per day.

The entire table? You want to do daily zone transfers? And that alleviates the load on higher-level servers how, exactly?

[Mannaggia l'America]

My 80 year old mother got some spam that she had won $500 at an online casino.

I worry about my dad with things like this. I set him up with his first computer and DSL last year. I check with him every week or two to be sure he did not get fooled by some phishing scam.

I'm not so worried about him getting on a spam list - I fear him getting tricked into giving out is SS# or bank account number.

[A Ruckus of Dogs]

Absolutely correct. There are people out there who want to get rich quick, lose weight fast, and have a bigger ... oh, never mind

[killjoy]

and have a bigger ... oh, never mind

There is that cream you are supposed to rub on and your .... is supposed to get bigger. Wouldn't your hand get bigger too?

[taxcontrol]

The companies centralized DNS server, I will refer to it as the local DNS, maintains the current table using updates, etc. Zone transfers only occur between the mail bastion host and the local DNS server, and yes the entire table.

[Wheee The People]

cream ? What about that vacuum pump I bought?

[general_re]

Yes, but what I'm asking is where does your local DNS machine get its information from? Are you planning to beat the hell out of a higher-level DNS server with daily zone transfer for you and everyone else running their own DNS box, or do you return to incremental queries? In which case, you haven't really solved the problem of hammering higher-level servers with requests for domains that none of the leaf DNS machines know about, have you?

[Disambiguator]

Wouldn't your hand get bigger too?

No, just your fingers.

[A Ruckus of Dogs]

Ha ha, true. What cracks me up about getting those spam ads is that I don't even have the organ in question.