First-hand report from Asia Pacific "Net abuse" conference [sp]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Report on 4th APCAUCE asia pacific antispam conference
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 11:14:58 +0000
From: suresh () outblaze com (Suresh Ramasubramanian)
Organization: Outblaze Limited - http://www.outblaze.com
To: declan () well com, dave () farber net

Declan and Dave

I and other members of APCAUCE (http://www.apcauce.org / CAUCE Asia
Pacific) recently helped organize an asia pacific regional antispam
conference on 2/26, during APRICOT 2004 in Kuala Lumpur, with Dave
Crocker kindly agreeing to be the keynote speaker.

Please excuse any rough edges - this is just an eyewitness account
that doubles as a post to IP / politech :)

The photographs of this event are available at
http://www.jameslick.com/apcauce4/

---

APCAUCE Organizes Fourth Asia Pacific Conference on Net Abuse

The fourth Asia Pacific Net Abuse conference was held on 2/26/2004 at
the Palace of Golden Horses hotel, Kuala Lumpur, and attended by over 70
delegates from ISPs, government regulatory authorities and internet
associations from around the Asia Pacific region.

The keynote address, a holistic overview of the spam situation, was
delivered by Dave Crocker, a man who has, in a quiet and unassuming
manner, been involved over the last thirty years in the development and
implementation of some of the fundamental concepts of internet and email.

This was followed by a panel discussion on the cause and effect of
antispam blocklist listings.  Richard DG Cox of the SBL antispam
blocklist (http://www.spamhaus.org) and Syahrul Sazli, a senior systems
administrator at Jaring (http://www.jaring.my), one of Malaysia's
largest ISPs, discussed this issue.  The panel was moderated by Suresh
Ramasubramanian, manager of antispam operations at Outblaze
(http://www.outblaze.com), which is a large mail hosting provider that
uses several blocklists to filter spam from reaching its users.

The panelists drew attention to the problems faced by asian ISPs, who
are increasingly finding their mailservers and IP addresses blocked for
spam because of an increasing trend of spam hosting.

The reason for this trend is apparently that ISPs and hosting providers
in some asian countries are becoming increasingly popular with spammers
around the world, who are perpetually looking for ISPs from which they
will not be terminated for spamming.  Quite a few asian providers are
apparently fast becoming infested with spammer hosted websites and
mailservers, either because of their lack of knowledge about spam, or
because of slow reaction times on the part of the ISP's support and
antispam staff.  Jaring had persistent problems with one such spammer,
and faced the unappealing prospect of extensive listings in the

This panel struck a chord with several ISPs in the audience, who
peppered the panelists with several questions about listing / removal
criteria of blocklists and their role in spam filtering.

The panel was followed by a regional update session, where
representatives from various asia pacific economies, associated with
internet associations, governments, regulatory agencies / watchdog
bodies et al gave short updates on the status of spam problems, and of
antispam legislation in their respective regions.

The speakers included -

Shamsul Jafni Shafie - Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission

Li Yu Xiao - Director of the Antispam Task Force, Internet Society of China

David Harris - Counsellor, Internet New Zealand

James Seng - InfoComm Development Authority, Singapore

Andrew Maurer - National Office of the Information Economy (NOIE), Australia

Arthur Shay - Shay and Partners, Taipei

Jeonghye Choi - Internet Association of Korea

The regional update session, which brings together people from around
the asia pacific region, was first introduced in APCAUCE 2 at Taipei, in
February 2003.  It has been quite successful in its aim of exposing
people who are responsible for consulting on or implementing antispam
legislation to their counterparts from other regions.

This cross pollination of ideas has proved quite fruitful - Australia's
NOIE signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Korean
Information Security Agency (KISA) in October 2003, about a month after
representatives from these two organizations met during the regional
updates at APCAUCE 3,  Pusan.  This was announced in
http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/confidence/Improving/Korea_MoU.htm and
reported in The Register at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/35353.html

The final event of the day was a panel that discussed new antispam
proposals that are being introduced today.  The panelists were Dave
Crocker and David Harris, and the discussion was moderated by James
Seng.  This panel was well received and provoked an animated discussion
on the features, merits and demerits of these new proposals

As this panel points out, the current proposals can be categorized into
three broad headings -

1. Sender Pays email schemes - such as the "e-stamp" project introduced
by Daum, one of korea's largest ISPs, and Microsoft's recent penny black
project.  David Harris' presentation summarizing these is at
http://icauce.org/proceedings/David_Harris(panel).pdf

note: A presentation on Daum's online stamp initiative, delivered during
APCAUCE 3 (august 2003 at Pusan, Korea) is at
http://www.apcauce.org/meetings/030825/proceedings/Jaewoong_Lee.pdf

2. Spam Disincentive Schemes such as Yahoo's domain keys.  these were
summarized by Dave Crocker.
http://icauce.org/proceedings/Dave_Crocker(panel).pdf

3. SPF / Sender Policy Framework (http://spf.pobox.com) - James Seng
presented a slideshow on SPF, on Meng Weng Wong's behalf.  Meng is the
originator of the SPF antispam proposal - a proposal that is being
widely adopted by several ISPs including Outblaze (for mail.com) and
AOL.  Meng regretfully expressed his inability to be present during the
APCAUCE conference.  The SPF presentation can be found at
http://spf.pobox.com/slides/apcauce2004/

A list of the presentations made at APCAUCE 4 can be found at
http://icauce.org/proceedings.htm

The next APCAUCE event will be held on July 28-29 2004 at Kathmandu,
Nepal, during a meeting of SANOG (http://www.sanog.org) - the South
Asian Network Operators Group.

regards
   --srs

-- 
srs (postmaster|suresh)@outblaze.com // gpg : EDEDEFB9
manager, outblaze.com security and antispam operations

note - I would strongly recommend the keynote address "Spam - Ready,
Fire, Aim" by Dave Crocker -
http://icauce.org/proceedings/Dave%20Crocker.pdf to your attention.

Another excellent read, an excellent summary of the problems faced by
asian isps and the possible role of legislative solutions in
regulating spam, is in Arthur Shay's presentation ".TW Update: Why So
Much Spam?  What is Being Done to Reduce it?":
http://icauce.org/proceedings/Arthur_Shay.pdf


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