Subject: [Asrg] News Article - Spammers and zombies

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 21:28:19 -0400

Take a look at this article 
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3036092.stm) at BBC.

----snip---
Computers belonging to thousands of companies across the world are being 
hijacked by e-mail spammers to disguise their true identities and host 
their websites.
-----snip----

Yakov 

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: Rodney Tillotson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 09:12:59 +0100

At 01/07/2003 21:28 -0400, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:

> http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3036092.stm
> ...
> Computers belonging to thousands of companies across the world are
> being hijacked by e-mail spammers to disguise their true identities
> and host their websites.

The 'disguising' systems were mostly open proxies; systems left
insecure by their owners but not modified by an intruder. I guess the
website hosting was either through vulnerabilities of running servers
or a combination of open proxy client and wrong ACL on proxy server;
but I haven't checked that.

There is a quite different process where someone adds or modifies
software by Trojan persuasion or some platform vulnerability, and the
added software acts as a bulk mail injector.

Not picking nits, but using the name 'zombie' instead of a description
assumes we all know the code, and in this case either Yakov or I (or
both) did not. If forced to use 'zombie' I would take it to be the
added software, and the BBC report was about open proxies.

And, of course, 'spam' is name calling too. Since it needs to be
defined on each occasion it is used, you shouldn't bother. This group
has found that out but (if other forums are any guide) will probably
have to revisit it at regular intervals. I will not trigger that just
now -- I hope :-)

The article probably conveys something reasonable to lay readers, so
it's a good one. For this group, perhaps note that a variety of
technologies and business practices are brought together to achieve
marketing through Unsolicited Bulk E-mail. It's a broad problem and
the way out of it will take a broad range of activities.
But you knew that.

Incidentally, I gather that the bulk mailers thrown off Telefonica
in the article have moved to Verio.

Rodney Tillotson, JANET-CERT
+44 1235 822 255.