nanog mailing list archives

Re: McColo: Are the 'Lights On" at Telia?


From: Matthew Moyle-Croft <mmc () internode com au>
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:45:17 +1030



Chris Lewis wrote:
Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:
The difficulty is that local blocking is only useful to block C&C
communications from infected machine in _your_ netblock.  It doesn't at
all stop inbound port 25 connections from infected machines elsewhere.
Yeah - got it. It's Sunday afternoon here ... I got all hopeful it might be easy.
In some limited cases, you might see a benefit to blocking DNS queries
from their netblocks.  Some "spam-by-compromised-machine" mechanisms
have the C&C doing the MX lookups for the victims.  Mostly because the
"compromised machine" is merely a proxy, and _can't_ do the MXes.  I
doubt these BOTnet C&Cs do.  More efficient to have the BOTs themselves
doing it.
Actually, it's a pity the compromised machines don't do DNS - then you'd be able to do some interesting things with resolvers and looking for MX lookup abnormalities.


MMC

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