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Re: [Asrg] 6. Proposals - DNSRBL - Osirusoft shut down

2003-08-28 04:09:34
At 11:35 PM -0400 8/26/03, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
According to the several messages (http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg12818.html) and (http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/27/0214238.shtml?tid=111&tid=126), the Osirusoft blacklists have been shutdown, and are currently rejecting email from all incoming addresses.

This has implications for DNSRBLs in general including the BCP area - how to account for a DNSRBL shutting down or being unreachable due a DDOS attack.

The only implication I see is that people managing mail systems should be a little more careful about whose DNSBL's they trust. There have been issues of technical competence, transparency, and trustworthiness raised regarding Joe Jared's operation of that DNSBL essentially since day one, and what he did yesterday was a sociopathic act by Joe Jared, not the direct result of any attack on his systems. The decreasing availability and currency of his blacklist has been documented in public over the past few weeks, but it remained at least occasionally available at least through Monday and was apparently available enough yesterday to allow many sites to use it as a basis to reject perfectly legitimate mail in large volume.

Simply put: a DNSBL doesn't suddenly list all of 0.0.0.0/0 by accident or because of some attack on its source, it requires an intentional act of the person controlling the list. Using a list whose operator is prone to such fits of pique is not a good idea.

--
Bill Cole bill(_at_)scconsult(_dot_)com


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