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FIB - Scams 101 - Ye Olde Archives
Posted By: The Roadie <wcarton@flash.net> In Response To: Ever heard of the Tower of Babel? (Rick K.)
Thursday, 5 May 2005, at 9:13 a.m.
> It will randomly generate up to 10,000 fake e-mail addresses. At the
> bottom of the page is a link that generates 10,000 more, esentially
> sending the webharvesting robots into a loop.
Works for some old versions of harvesters. Most of the ones I've seen for sale in the last two years have been modified to not fall for this exploit.
But it can't hurt. It's just that the spam war is an arms race, and the current level of threat has evolved. Spammers now have the distributed bandwidth and CPU power to create addresses consisting of ALL letter and number combinations up to 10-12 characters, combine those user names with EVERY domain they can discover by harvesting the whois database, and spam away, even if 99,999 out of 100,000 emails never make it to a real address. Billions of addresses are being spammed every day that don't exist (it's called a dictionary attack), and the spammers don't care. They feel no pain.
> This is one way to fight back spammers, as they have to clean out their
> databases as the databases become clogged with fake addresses.
Spammers don't seem to *ever* clean out their databases anymore. They never see the bounces and rejections, so they have no incentive. Heck, we see spam being sent to "admin" and "abuse" addresses all the time. How smart is that?!?
> In theory, the bad e-mail addresses will result in "bounced"
> mail that their ISP's will investigate...and hopefully cancel their
> account.
Ummm, not for 4-5 years have any but the stupidest spammers even used their ISP to handle bounces. Now they forge the address of an innocent victim, sometimes the address of the last ISP they lost a hosting account with, sometimes an anti-spammer like me. And the bounces and rejections go to an uninvolved party. Not very friendly of the spammers, but it's part of the war.
> If you want to take a look, go to Tower of Babel and see what you
> think.
If it makes you feel better, go for it. I predict it won't help the war much, but it could increase your bandwidth charges if you pay any. Be careful.
> I'm going to put it on all my websites. I HATE getting randomly-generated
> e-mail from the spambots.
What do you mean "randomly generated"? If you receive email sent to any address at your domain (called a "catch-all") this won't affect your spamload at all.
> And, what's so great about it, the bots essentially "spam
> themselves!"
Sorry, and sadly, but no. Professional spam is now being sent by way of armies of virus-compromised systems, mostly on broadband connections, infected with custom-commissioned viruses to leave the victim running a background spam relay. If the spammer controls a network of 100,000 or more of these zombies, each victim relays only a few emails per minute and the victim never even sees their system slow down, so they're not suspicious they've been compromised.
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