Security Incidents mailing list archives

Re: Fishing for open relays


From: Brett Glass <brett () LARIAT ORG>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 11:56:40 -0700

It appears that a spammer is conducting relay tests from his or
her DSL line. S/he is looking at the SMTP responses and may
also be using a "throw-away" Webmail account to "catch"
successfully relayed mail from the test. If s/he's smart, s/he
is only attempting to send mail to the Webmail account if the
server appears to have accepted the address for relaying.

The correct course of action is to complain to the DSL provider,
who should find this to be ample grounds to terminate the
account.

--Brett Glass

At 04:42 PM 10/31/2000, John Pettitt wrote:

Anybody else been seeing this?  I've been getting a lot of "relay tests" of
late some look legit (AOL seems to be scanning for open relays) and some
like this one look bogus (why would joymail.com use a pac-bell DSL account?)

John


Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 15:35:09 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Postfix SMTP server: errors from
adsl-216-102-218-162.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net[216.102.218.162]

Transcript of session follows.

Out: 220 gatekeeper.cloudview.com ESMTP Postfix
In:  HELO Scanner
Out: 250 gatekeeper.cloudview.com
In:  MAIL FROM: abusecheck () joymail com
Out: 250 Ok
In:  RCPT TO: mailservers () joymail com
Out: 554 <mailservers () joymail com>: Recipient address rejected: Relay access
    denied

Session aborted, reason: lost connection


John Pettitt                                     Email: jpp () cloudview com

To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
To the plumber, any liquid in the glass is potential income.

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