nanog mailing list archives

Re: How do you stop outgoing spam?


From: Hank Nussbacher <hank () att net il>
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 20:24:19 +0300 (IDT)


On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

Looking for automatic off-the-shelf solution.  Not something that requires
a NOC to constantly update a Cisco ACL.

-Hank

On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

The spamming is usually done (but not only) from an Internet cafe where the
spammer inserts a "spammer CD" and blasts away at open mail relays.When
SMTP is blocked for that IP, they switch to HTTP and send the spam via MSN,
Yahoo, Hotmail, Kukamail, Outblaze, Safe-mail, etc. to name just a
few.Blocking port 80 is harder since it requires maintaining an ever
larger list of free public web based mail systems or just block port 80
entirely.

You could traffic shape or rate limit the traffic towards port 80 to a few
kbps for each IP address that might be used for spamming. If you allow
small bursts (10 - 50k) this should be just fine for regular web access,
since for that outgoing traffic is minimal: just the HTTP requests and
ACKs. However, it will slow down spamming to at most a couple dozen spams
per minute after the first few that fill up the configured burst size. I
imagine this will make the spammers move on to greener pastures.


Hank Nussbacher



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