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Getting hammered by bots. Working on it

Started by Jeff, December 08, 2017, 10:42:40 AM

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MbfVA

Granted you and the FF are dealing with a different problem from simple time wasting spam, which is a problem for everyone on the net, but my point is that it is easy to stop the time wasters.  Not an expert nor trying to sound like one but I think you will find that even the jerks who attack your system and others have to have help somewhere along the way from someone/some entity in the legit world who makes money by looking the other way.  It's that way in lot of things that go on that irritate us.

I spent 4 years active in the political world as an elected local supervisor, which included in particular an eyeopening meeting as part of a lobbying group for the National Association of Counties with a senior now retired US Senator in DC.  It was an important but very mundane issue, but it brought me face to face with the reality of "yes, you are right but it is not going to happen because of powerful interests out of our control".  Don't laugh, but it involved "trash".

Politics including, yes, the business world (a VERY political place), is on the inside a lot like the duck whose major struggles and activity are unseen and frankly, not understood by many/most.

Some of it is "necessary" but some of it would make you mad enough to take up arms and not for killing deer 🦌.

ps--never doubt the "power of taxation", check the story of Al Capone's downfall.
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Ianab

Problem is, spam is a global issue, with much of it originating in countries that lack any effective government. Basically any law that the US passes won't apply to some Russian bouncing his spam of a network of compromised machines in China. US already has laws against spamming, and if you use your own servers (in the US) to do it, you get arrested. So the spammers look to compromise other peoples machines, and use those to relay spam (as Jeff gave an example of). If someone traces the spam "source", things point back to the FF server, and Jeff. After that the trail either goes cold, or leads to some foreign country. Meanwhile the FF server gets "blacklisted" as a spam source, and even legit emails will be blocked by other servers.

The underlying issue with email and spam is that the original system had very little security or authentication built in. Servers receive and forward emails without actually verifying that they came from the source they claim. So you can put a from "support@ebay.com" or "customer_services@xyzbank.com". The SMTP protocol doesn't check that against any security certificate, it just passes the message on to the destination server.

Then a spam filter has to actually look at the message header (and contents) and try and guess if it's a legit message, or spam. Filter too aggressively, and legit email gets lost. Too lenient and too much spam gets through.

So putting a tax on emails would first be a nightmare to administer, there is no central accounting of emails, and as a spam deterrent, it would be useless anyway, as the spam isn't coming from legit sources.
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Andries

Quote from: Ianab on December 08, 2017, 11:28:19 PM
. . .  and managed to send him a copy of a "Crypto-locker", telling him it was a screen shot of his system. And he opened it.    :D
So, Ianab may have a source for code called a crypto-locker.
Jeff - how are you at lobb-ing out some 'hurt-lockers'?
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Ianab

QuoteSo, Ianab may have a source for code called a crypto-locker.

He just fished it out of his spam email folder, renamed the "Fedex_docket12345.pdf.exe" to "Screenshot.pdf.exe" and sent it to the scammer. After leading him on for 1/2 an hour trying to get the Teamviewer software to work. 

"Nah it's not working, can I send you a screenshot of what's going on?"

Scammer still thought he had a live one hooked, supplied a gmail address, and opened the file.

It's a sport for some of the techy guys to mess with these scammers.

Heck even my neighbour, who fixes farm milk chillers, is wise to them. "Yeah, I've got Windows open, but it's getting a bit cold in here now..."
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

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