On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 10:49:16PM -0400, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
At 09:38 PM 5/15/2003 -0400, you wrote:
On Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 17:59 US/Eastern, Yakov Shafranovich quoted:
"The results show that fewer than 1% of mail servers that are named in
mail addresses allowed relaying in August 2002, a very sharp reduction
from over 6% from a year and a half earlier. In the same 18 months, the
amount of spam a typical Internet users receives has gone up
significantly. This shows that the amount of spam is not related to the
number of open relays available."
I'd like to buck the trend for this list and admit my ignorance: if open
relays have gone down in number but spam has increased hugely, how is spam
now being sent, statistically speaking? Illegal hacking of buggy OSs? Or
are the remaining open relays just taking more and more traffic?
I believe Barry (from The World ISP) has mentioned that most spam now is
either being sent via off-shore servers and hacked/virus-infected machines.
That's not what I'm seeing. I'd say that there was a lot coming from
normal legitimate servers - sometimes offshore, sometimes in the US -
a lot coming via open proxies, a fair few through open relays, some
being sent through scripted freemail webmail, a few coming from compromised
machines and a few from end-user accounts.
Of the open proxies... some of the proxies are trojans, some are
installed by the machine owner.
Note that the FTC announced action against both open relays and open
proxies, if I recall the announcement correctly.
Cheers,
Steve
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