Comments on: NDR or Backscatter Spam – How Non Delivery Reports Become a Nuisance

By: grav

grav — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:50:51 +0000

@ Navin

It is not only my country
but pretty much any “modernized” country whose infrastructure is its most important sector

I bet you have a cellphone
I bet you watch TV (once in a while)
I bet you drive or take same sort of public transportation
Have you ever been on a plane?

The internet affects everything (or just about) in the vast majority of countries

I don’t know if you have a mall – or for that matter any big chain stores by you – but if you do, the surveillance cameras and motion detectors and the little things that beep of you run out the door without paying are all connected somehow. For most countries, having the internet inoperable in the wake of some huge DOS attack is just as crippling – if not more crippling – than having the electricity go out.

Corporations and even some consumers have generators and can live without electricity for a while. Can people adapt to having the anarchy of a crippled infrastructure? In this case I am referring to an attack on the whole infrastructure, not just internet.

Just my $0.02 : )

I can imagine a life without the Internet. A while back we were moving and for 6 months could not use the Internet for technical reasons. It wasn’t that bad.

Could I imagine what would happen if the whole country did not have internet access?

No. I could not. It would be like trying to return to telegram after decades of the telephone.

By: Navin

Navin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:49:39 +0000

Once again man, I point out the dependence of your country on the net…its absolutely amusing (while also amazingly serious) to say tht a day widout the internet and boom!!( tht’s for dramatic effect BTW), your entire system from medicine to defence to transport all comes to a grinding halt…screeeeeeeeeech!! (another dramatic effect)…Its hard to think how your country worked 3 decades ago (before the internet came into the picture)

By: grav

grav — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:32:34 +0000

Sleepy, you have made my day

I know that you understood that I was joking when I called it cool : )

The people that do things like that are in my opinion, royal douches

I would not like to imagine a week without internet in my WHOLE FRICKING COUNTRY!!!

Thank You Sleepy

By: Sleepy

Sleepy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:49:43 +0000

I’m not so sure that’s a “cool” use of a botnet. But for the sake of learning I’ll leave my comments at that. I’m glad Darknet gives those of us interested in security a place to discuss things but posts like that sure remind me that we are not all necessarily working with the same agenda.

Good post nonetheless grav.

By: grav

grav — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:32:46 +0000

The “coolest” use of botnets is by far to cause a DOS attack.
I don’t know where I was reading it, but a massive attack was performed on one of the former USSR countries. Hackers and botnet leaders flooded the whole infrastructure with millions upon millions of requests and crippled a whole country’s system for about a week.

@ Navin

Yup, I love :25 as well! Only problem is that with the recent burst of SPAM, my ISP is blocking me from connecting to any SMTP server than their own (their’s requires a password as well as a username, so it’s out of the question.)

I’m sure that there is a work-around but I cannot find one. So far, I had just been using the telnet client with CMD to send prank mail to all my friends. I suppose one suitable workaround would be to just set up s SMTP server on your own machine and then just connect to “localhost” when you would send anonymous mail. Only thing is that your IP address would be tracked immediately. Other workarounds might include connecting to an open relay server, but those are becoming harder and harder to find…

I suppose you could also log onto a school workstation or a library one and just use their smtp server to send mail. In general, they are more lax about protocol.

By: Navin

Navin — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:24:04 +0000

Ah…the ever so popular port 25
I’ll never get bored reading about ways to misuse this port….I think the world of hacking would be very lonely widout this port!!

By: Darknet

Darknet — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:16:06 +0000

Yeah most spam actually already comes from Botnets, it’s one of the biggest uses for compromised computers.

It’s the reason why many mail services blacklist SMTP sends from dynamic IP pools and many ISP’s block outgoing traffic on port 25 to stop these botnets from working.

By: Navin

Navin — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:42:33 +0000

@ grav
if there was something lyk tht happening widout any initial warning den it wud have disastrous results (kinda like a zero day attack) but I doubt that would happen…In real life email filters would almost instantaneously be updated and these malicious emails would be deliberately “lost-in-transit”. That’s what I feel…..

I really liked your $0.02 BTW, it’d make a good hollywood flick

By: grav

grav — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:42:03 +0000

Can you imagine what would happen if botnets (or zombie networks) and spam teamed up? Not only would the initial millions of computers be sent spam, everybody on their list would be sent something as well. This pattern could continue exponentially! What if the email clients were compromised into downloading malicious code? It would be a bot-army of spamming computers!!!

Just my $0.02

By: david

david — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:26:21 +0000

If people start using SPF this wouldn’t happen. Also depending on the antispam product that you use you can define or set the spam score of this NDR so it’s effect is not that bad for the end user.