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Re: [Asrg] URL shorteners, spam and DNS

2011-08-23 05:26:26
Hi,

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Levine" <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com>
To: asrg(_at_)irtf(_dot_)org
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 7:57:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Asrg] URL shorteners, spam and DNS

So I was wondering if it would help if shorteners published the URLs
in
a DNS txt record.

They could publish them in a DNS A record, which would require no
hackery at all to browsers.  That is, instead of

  http://bit.ly/abcde   -> http://abcde.bit.ly

We're actually doing something similar with Mailspike, not only for shorteners 
bot also for some abused web hosting providers.
The general idea is tracking shorteners being used in spam and do the 
get-final-destination-and-check-if-it-is-bad on our infrastructure, and then we 
publish "bad" shortener URIs as FQDNs using rbldsnsd.
I'm attaching a sample perl implementation if you want to take a look.

This is valid also for example for yahoogroups and others.
For example:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ebishuartrl/message points to a spammy URI, 
and the yahoo entry would map to the fqdn:

78e73102.0d448dd4.db0f6f37.tech.groups.yahoo.com

Thus allowing listing full URIs as fqdns.


But this would be a big problem for large ISPs, due to DNS caches
filling
up with the things, a problem noted when Facebook did something
similar.

R's,
John


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--
Joao Gouveia
AnubisNetworks
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joao(_dot_)gouveia(_at_)anubisnetworks(_dot_)com
http://www.anubisnetworks.com

Attachment: ExtendedURI.pm
Description: Perl program

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