Re: Netblock reassigned from Chile to US ISP...

[Andy Davidson <andy () nosignal org>]

On 13 Dec 2008, at 12:39, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:33:51 -0800 "Tomas L. Byrnes"  
> <tomb () byrneit net> wrote:
> > Because anyone with half a brain blocks proxies from their e- 
> > commerce site.
> What is a proxy?  A garden-variety squid server, in the DMZ of a  
> corporate firewall?  The nasty box in some hotels that "helps"  
> guests surf the net?  A socks proxy installed by the RBN on  
> unsuspecting desktops?

Hi,

We've all jumped on Tomas, but I suspect that the word 'open' was  
missing from his summary.  I've worked in e-commerce environments  
where we deployed tools that checked whether orders with high risk  
scores appeared to come through an open proxy, and unusual browsing  
patterns were detected and investigated for the same.

I wont give the game away, since some of the people on this list will  
be able to work out who I am talking about :-) but open proxies are a  
source of fraudulent orders, and also competitors spidering e-commerce  
sites for price and availability information.  Making it harder for  
both was an important job - both groups of troublemakers would look  
for a softer target elsewhere.


Andy