CAUCE

Resources for Cleaning Your Network

Image by dr.jd via Flickr

The first step (but certainly not the last) towards saving the internet from spam, malware, and other abuse is to keep your own network clean.

A friend of CAUCE, who wishes to remain anonymous, offers these tips and resources to help you identify problem traffic emanating from your network, and clean it up.  Though primarily written for ISPs, many of the items below should apply equally well to any network owner.

Zero-point: Problems which aren't identified don't get fixed. So...

First and foremost, proper identification of the ISP's IPs in both RIR (APNIC) and rDNS. Along with that, working and properly processed Abuse e-mail contact for APNIC and "abuse@domain" for the generic rDNS primary domain. Correct domain whois goes hand-in-hand.

Then, in no particular order...

Block port 25 on dynamic ranges, as recommended by MAAWG.

Complaint Feedback Loops and other abuse reporting mechanisms: Spamhaus and Word To The Wise both have links to get started on those, and ISPs serious about cleaning up should subscribe all their IP ranges to as many of those FBLs as they can handle. (The best for spam detection would be subscribing to all of them but volume can get quite high so they may wish to pick and choose what fits their needs the best.)

That includes SpamCop, but it's worth its own mention. Unlike most other FBLs, SpamCop reports spamvertised URLs as well as spam source. Note that it has both direct spam reporting and "Summary" reports which provide IP-by-IP reporting for a subscribed range on an hourly or daily basis.

www.abuse.net can help them direct spam reports to the right place.  SpamCop seems to look at Abuse.net, too.

CBL offers rsync of its data within terms of use posted on its website. An ISP with that data can use grepcidr across its IP ranges to identify currently active spam-bot IPs.

Spamhaus PBL provides participating ISPs with CBL's list bots in the respective ISP's IP ranges, so that's another easy way for ISPs to get that same data.

Botnet C&C and malware related IPs identified by the FIRE group can be
found by ASN with http://maliciousnetworks.org/ .

Senderbase.org, Trustedsource.org and Senderscore.org websites all have searchable reputational information which can help an ISP corroborate reports they get with a wider sample of traffic...very useful.

I'm sure there are more such resources, I'd be interested in them and I hope others will chime in, but for an ISP which is already overrun with spam issues, those websites should at least give them grist to start grinding away at the problems. I suspect the more difficult challenge will be to get them to actually back the effort.

Any ideas?  Post them in the comments, and maybe our anonymous friend will join in too.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Computerworld: Outbound spam: the canary in the coalmine (boxofmeat.net)
• Which "experts" do you listen to? (spamtacular.com)

ARIN makes a sane decision about IP WHOIS

The recent ARIN XXV meeting in Toronto had two positive developments related to WHOIS privacy and accuracy of data.

A decision was rendered about contentious proposal 2010-3: Customer Confidentiality https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2010_3.html which allowed for commercial IP holders to have hidden WHOIS records, ostensibly to prevent client poaching between ISPs. As one commenter said at the meeting 'if you are losing customers, fix your business'.

Both CAUCE and MAAWG were opposed to this proposal, which was withdrawn by the submitter, Aaron Wendel, after some discussions with representatives of the LEA community. The proposal made provision for decloaking WHOIS records upon request, court order, etc. by law enforcement, a hopelessly naive understanding of the current situation with regard to anti-abuse work. It was impressed upon the assemblage that grass-roots anti-spam investigations were behind the majority of takedowns of malicious sites, for example. Tom Grasso, an FBI investigator who was in attendance commented, "95% of our successful cases are as a result of grassroots investigators. Limiting ARIN WHOIS to LEA is not a good idea"

Despite having been withdrawn, a vote was taken, and nonetheless, defeated roundly.

Of the 133 attendees to the meeting, 5 voted in favour, 70 against.

A second bit of good news was related by Leslie Nobile, ARIN Director of Registration Services who noted that ARIN would commence a process of confirming all WHOIS email points of contact, beginning in June, 2010, and that this would become an annual process.

CAUCE Director Matt Sergeant was in attendance at ARIN to represent our position as a signatory and supporter of the MAAWG position statement.

Download MAAWG Comments ARIN Draft Policy 2010-3

Email User Safety At Risk - MAAWG Consumer Survey 2010

The 2010 version of the now-annual Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group (MAAWG) ‘Email Security Awareness and Usage Report’ was released yesterday. While un-belied by the title, the vernacular name might get a bit more attention: ‘The MAAWG Consumer Email Survey”.

The key findings of this comprehensive study can be found here, and the full report downloaded here.

Consumers were surveyed in North America and across Europe with a variety of questions from computer expertise and savvy, to their preferences of email.

Many of the findings are both shocking and disturbing; despite efforts to the educate, consumers are well unaware of the consequences of their actions, and a painful percentage continue to click on spam, knowingly, instead of deleting it immediately. Such actions has, of course, lead to the gargantuan increase in botnet presence on the ‘net and zombie’d computers continue to steal millions of bits of personal and confidential business information as a result.

Clearly, a concerted effort to heighten consumer awareness of the very real dangers on the net is needed; involving all stakeholders, marketers, receiving sites, government, and NGO consumer advocacy groups. The resources are out there, for example StopSpamHere.ca and Onguardonline.gov (more resources below), but do not appear to be used, or sage advice heeded.

Equally striking are the findings about the email consumers actually want and care about. it has long been CAUCE's contention that email is about personal communication. The survey's respondents from across the world agree.

On page 14 of the full report consumers state their preferences for various types of email; clearly one-to-one communications is still the cock of the walk when it comes to the type of email we all like to receive, messages from friends and family were ranked as ‘extremely or very important’ to 82% of respondents.

Strikingly, marketing email was only rated similarly by 15% of those surveyed; however, 32% did view such mail as ‘somewhat important’.

Graphic courtesy of MAAWG.org,reproduced with permission

This seemingly speaks to some fundamental issues that the marketing community must deal with if they are to better themselves in the eyes of consumers, irrelevant content and over-mailing are serious issues that enlightened marketers are working hard to deal with, but much more can be done, industry-wide to address them.

Other End-user oriented Resources (please help promote them!)
StaySafeOnline.org
StopBadware.org

A Dangerous Buzz, and Opt-In Isn't Just for Email

Image by dr.jd via Flickr

Google is great at generating buzz, and they've done it again with their new social vitality tool, appropriately named Google Buzz.

Buzz takes all of your GMail contacts (and presumably other connections from elsewhere within the Googleplex), and makes them all your "friends" by default; it then shares your activity from Google Reader, YouTube, and other tools with all of them, and vice versa.  They can see who your friends are, and you can see who theirs are.  It's a quick & impressive way to make a whole new social network out of the original social networking tool: email.

Only one problem: all of those connections, and all of that public information, happens by default.  You do get to choose whether or not to activate Buzz, but apparently it's activated either way — and if you say no, you won't have access to the nearly-hidden privacy controls.

These may seem like small issues: Facebook already tells the world who you're friends with, and Twitter updates are public by default.  But with both of those, you choose to sign up and you know what you're getting (until it changes.)  Buzz is different: you signed up for GMail, and suddenly this other thing happened too.  Suddenly, things you thought were private are public.  It's tantamount to spyware.

This is all of particular concern to someone like the author of the Fugitivus blog, who writes anonymously about her life — including some truly disturbing experiences, being raised in an abusive family and then married to an abusive husband.  Everyone should have the right to make their own privacy choices; for her, privacy is absolutely required.  Her well-being, perhaps even her life depends on it.

When Google Buzz showed up, it revealed her activity to all of her most common correspondents — which includes her ex-husband.  Things she had thought she was only sharing with her boyfriend and her mother, that she thought she had control over, were now automatically shown to someone she has very good reason to trust no further than her inbox.  See the problem here?

We've talked for years about the "opt-in" paradigm for email: companies and organizations should not send you advertisements unless you've asked for them — even if they believe you'll be interested.  Similarly, companies and organizations should not be sharing your information with others — even if they believe you know the person — without asking first.

Shame on Google for not considering the choice aspect of privacy before launching Buzz.  You know better.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fugitivus: Fuck you, Google (boxofmeat.net)
• Google: Buzz off! (accmanpro.com)
• Google Buzz: The Missing Features (readwriteweb.com)
• Google Buzz And Their Social Strategy (cloudave.com)
• Is Google Reader Still an RSS Reader? (staynalive.com)
• Google will Improve Buzz based on Users' Feedback (taragana.com)

Maybe email IS dead -- part of it, anyway.

by J.D. Falk

I tend to chuckle at every new proclamation that email is dead. Google Wave won't kill it. Twitter and Facebook aren't killing it; they're using it. RSS didn't kill it. Instant messaging didn't kill it. "Push media" (remember that?) didn't kill it. AOL and Compuserve and Prodigy didn't kill it; they joined it. And before that, usenet and email lived happily side-by-side.

Over the years the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), the world's oldest and largest email advocacy organization, has also predicted the death of email. Some day, we've said, we will reach a tipping point where spam finally makes email unusable for regular people. And for any people who doesn't have good spam filters, that's already happened. Avoiding email's death by spam has given rise to the spam filtering & security industry, and the equally powerful mailbox hosting industry. It has elevated open source projects like SpamAssassin from curiosities to necessities. I've lost count of the number of hardcore geeks who've finally given up on running their own severs, and moved their personal mail to Gmail.

Through these efforts, and these small personal concessions, email survives. But it's not the same, and I'm left wondering if a part of email has died.

Follow C-27 Updates on CAUCE Twitter, and sign our Twitter Petitions

Lots of activity in the twitersphere: http://twitter.com/#search?q=c-27

CAUCE live and kicking on Twitter / Linkedin / and Facebook - follow us!

[ Sign the CAUCE online petition to support Canada's antispam bill C-27
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/SupportC27/ ]

McColo and the Difficulty of Fighting Spam

CAUCE's own Ray Everett-Church writes: It may be a truism that "little things mean a lot," but in the world of spam, flipping a single switch can have huge consequences that span the globe. We saw that concept reinforced this past week when McColo Corp., an Internet hosting firm based in San Jose, Calif., had its Internet connection shut off by its upstream connectivity providers on suspicion that McColo was serving as a command and control center for various spamming "bot net" operations as well as a base of operations for various other unsavory activities. Of course everyone, even McColo, is innocent until proven guilty. But in the days following the disconnection, global spam volumes have reportedly dropped by nearly two-thirds. I suppose it could be a coincidence... Read the rest here.

The Root of All Email

by J.D. Falk

This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published a number of what they call "RFCs," which originally meant "Requests for Comment" -- the standards documents which specify the technical underpinnings of the internet. Two of these, numbered 5321 and 5322, replace earlier documents defining the very core of internet email.

On the surface, each of these seem surprisingly simple; one aims "...to transfer mail reliably and efficiently," while the other defines itself as "...a definition of what message content format is to be passed between systems." Yet without general industry-wide acceptance of (and compliance with) these standards, internet email simply would not exist.

This week also marks ten years since the death of Jon Postel, who arguably had more influence over the creation of the internet than any other single person. One of Jon's most enduring recommendations is to "be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive," which Vint Cerf (who had only slightly less influence over the early internet), described as "...a reminder that in a multi-stakeholder world, accommodation and understanding can go a long way towards reaching consensus or, failing that, at least toleration of choices that might not be at the top of everyone's list."

This philosophy is the root of all email, from the earliest standards discussions to the latest theories of authentication, reputation, and deliverability.

Trust in Email Begins with Authentication

by J.D. Falk

As most CAUCE supporters already know, forging From: or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It's one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of Internet email technology -- though of course that's only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-Internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s.

Since then, things have changed -- and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. Before you can answer the question "can I trust this message," you have to ask "who sent it?" -- but before authentication, there was often no way to know for sure.

The first authentication technology to catch the interest of the industry was Meng Wong's SPF, which also formed the basis for Microsoft's SenderID. In parallel, Yahoo! developed DomainKeys, which has now evolved into DKIM. All of these are free to use, though some have licensing requirements or patents which may prevent derivative works.

Having what looks like four entirely different technologies may seem confusing, and marketing tactics from some of the organizations involved certainly haven't helped. Luckily, our friends at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group have published a new white paper, Trust in Email Begins with Authentication, which should help to clarify things. It provides a much-needed substantive overview of the authentication methods and practices currently in use, without inappropriate bias or attempts at coercion.

CAUCE hopes that this effort will raise the level of debate within the email industry, and lead to faster adoption of authentication technologies. Sender authentication will not, obviously, solve spam -- it has very little to do with spam, in fact -- but curtailing the bad guys' ability to send messages that look like they're from your bank or other trusted institution will certainly help.

[Some CAUCE Board members -- including the author of this article -- contributed to the MAAWG document, and are regular attendees of MAAWG events.]

eBay, Paypal and Yahoo!

Yahoo users can feel a little bit more secure when receiving email from eBay and Paypal after Thursday's Yahoo! yodel: Say goodbye to eBay and PayPal fraudsters.

"We've teamed up with eBay and PayPal to become the first Web mail service to block the delivery of unauthenticated eBay and PayPal emails, reducing your risks of receiving phishing scams or fraudulent emails. Our weapon is a technology Yahoo! spearheaded called DomainKeys, which uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender."

This is the first major announcement of this kind, be prepared for more to follow by authenticating your mail now. Not just your commercial or transactional email but also your Corporate email.