6 ms·

Provocateur Comes Into View After Cyberattack

32 points by uladzislau 14y ago

dmix 14y ago
Non-mobile version with graphics: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/after-cyberattack-sven-olaf-kamphuis-is-at-heart-of-investigation.html?hp&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/after-cybe...
zimbatm 14y ago
> Spamhaus acted, he wrote, “without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers ..." That's the issue. It sucks to wake up one day and find out that your mail server has been blacklisted. All your customers are now affected and it's too late. If they added whole IP blocks to the list it might be even more annoying. That said it's not like Spamhaus is charging you to be removed from their list, it just takes a little bit of time once you cleanup. http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/Spamhaus%20SBL#137 http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/Spamhaus%20SBL#137
- nsns 14y ago
  Very good overview of Spamhous' practices in Ars today (http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/when-spammers-go-to-war-behind-the-spamhaus-ddos/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/when-spammers-go-to-...).
  - kevingadd 14y ago
    Some of the behaviors described by Ars definitely sound shady to me; big ISP doesn't agree with you on the definition of illegal behavior, or in fact insists that local laws obligate them to protect their customers, so you blacklist the entire ISP? Complete nonsense. Feels to me like Spamhaus' operators understand that they now have a big hammer to swing (due to their popularity) so they use it freely to punish anyone they consider to be an 'evildoer', regardless of the collateral damage. If I were a customer of that ISP, I wouldn't be blaming the ISP, I'd be blaming Spamhaus. It also makes me wonder: How legit are the people running Spamhaus? If someone decides he wants to make a quick buck, is it possible for him to just arbitrarily add a site's IP ranges to the routing blacklist, and then send the site's operators a cash demand, like DDOS operators sometimes do?
    - wpietri 14y ago
      Disagree all you want, but that's definitely not nonsense. The way the Internet has worked since day 1 is as a bunch of relatively independent groups deciding who they'll talk to and in what fashion. If a bunch of people don't want to talk to your ISP because of who the ISP hosts, that seems pretty sensible to me. And if they have decided to trust Spamhaus to make those calls, that also seems reasonable. Supposing you get your wish and Spamhaus disappears tomorrow. What's your proposed solution? With the kind of money that on-line crime like spamming and phishing makes, it's easy enough to find somewhere to buy protection from law enforcement. Or just buy laws. Either we decide not to talk to the bad neighborhoods, or the globally connected nature of the Internet means that we all live in the worst neighborhood.
      - kevingadd 14y ago
        When did I say Spamhaus should go away? Anyway, you're missing my point: Why on earth do you have to blacklist the entire ISP to deal with one customer? Presumably if you are certain that one specific customer is to blame, and you're demanding that customer be disconnected, you know which IPs the customer is using and you can block them. Or you are otherwise able to identify the customer, say through headers - in which case, you should filter those headers. Blacklisting the ISP should only be necessary if the ISP is intentionally helping its customer obscure their identity and disguising spammy/malicious traffic as normal traffic. There is no excuse for punishing innocent web users and businesses for the actions of third parties, or for holding those innocents hostage in order to force their ISP to do something you want. The fact that the ISP later complained to the authorities suggests to me that this is exactly what happened. Is it really impossible from a technical perspective to do anything other than blackhole the entire ISP? I'll admit I'm not an expert on IPv4, but that seems implausible to me. The problem with these policies and principles you're defending is that they can be equally applied to innocents in order to do harm. I'm not claiming I have some perfect alternative; I am merely pointing out that Spamhaus' means don't seem legitimate, even if their ends are legitimate. And in this case, the legitimacy of the ends can come into question as well. There's a gray area between obvious spam (penis pills, etc) and obvious solicited mail (personal mails between individuals) - Twitter sends me emails regularly containing tweets by people I follow, because I have an account, but I never solicited that email. Is it spam? What if there are other people who do want those emails, even if I don't? Is it really appropriate to blacklist Twitter? The Twitter example isn't a fantasy, either; Gmail automatically started sending those things to my Spam folder without my intervention, and I've seen it do that to other content in the past. Would you be happy if Spamhaus added the IP ranges of businesses and ISPs you interact with to its blacklists? What if they blacklisted your home ISP?
- gav 14y ago
  I've never had a problem with Spamhaus, it's straightforward enough to get removed from the list if needed. It's way worse dealing with providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo who arbitrarily block mail. I'd argue that 99% of businesses are better served letting a third-party deal with marketing and transactional emails and only use outgoing SMTP for their own emails.
- corresation 14y ago
  That isn't the issue however as it is a voluntary list: they don't actually block anything, but those who trust their process block based upon that list. The difference is small but enormous, and if they were sloppy with their list people wouldn't use it.
- blatherard 14y ago
  You left off three words from the quote in the NYTimes article. "...and Jew lies" This is quite the omission. The full quote is 'Spamhaus acted, he wrote, “without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.” When I read that, I get a very different picture than simply one of an aggrieved businessman working in a grey area.
  - zimbatm 14y ago
    Exactly my aim. The angle I wanted to take was just spam-haus related and didn't want to introduce Semitic argumentation. I'm not trying to defend Mr. Kamphuis, just taking a different angle since the press seem to be unilateral.
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  I've heard the same argument time and time again when I was still working for an ISP and involved in spam-fighting back in the 90's. Reality is, you have to totally ignore complaint after complaint about spam coming from your network before you end up on any blacklist. Most common form of negligence often came from some management decision to let role accounts like abuse@ get handled by non-technical communication or support people with zero authority to escalate the problem. If that still happens in 2013, fuck them. Bottom line is that only willful negligence or deliberate support to spammers can get you blacklisted. If you are in no hurry to remove spammers, don't expect Spamhaus e.a. to be in any hurry to un-blacklist you.
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    The problem is that the blacklists have no problem with harming the customers of the network, who have done nothing wrong.
nlh 14y ago
Note to those of you who have, plan to, or might possibly have any sort of agenda about anything in your lives: Raw, brutish racism/culturalism doesn't help your message. At all. I read a line like this: "Spamhaus acted, he wrote, 'without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.'" And regardless of whether he's right or not about Spamhaus, his credibility in my eyes has gone straight to absolute zero.
- nonamegiven 14y ago
  It's amazing to me that anyone speaking that point of view has any credibility at all. With anyone.
- socillion 14y ago
  > And regardless of whether he's right or not about Spamhaus, his credibility in my eyes has gone straight to absolute zero. Wasn't that entirely the point of the article, to attack his character? If he was some lawyer stiff, people wouldn't be reading this - they enjoy reading content-light articles that spin caricatures of charismatic individuals. Assange all over again! It's hardly debatable whether he would have gotten media exposure like this if he didn't behave in such a manner; I think that overall this exposure will help his cause, not hurt it. Even if a majority discard STOPhaus claims immediately on the basis that their spokesman appears to be a nut, the minority dwarfs anything they would have reached otherwise. tl;dr you only saw this message because it was raw, brutish, and insensitive.
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  In this particular case, it has less to do with racism/antisemitism and more with conspiracy paranoia.
codezero 14y ago
“Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project ‘spamhaus.org,’ which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the Internet,” Nobody is forced to use Spamhaus, right? They aren't dictating what is on the Internet, they are offering a list to filter what they think is junk and people can choose to use that or not. Also, I am curious, did he ever care about Spamhaus before he started to get included in their blacklists?
contingencies 14y ago
The real problem with spam is that there is no presently widespread, realistic alternative to email in the field of P2P store and forward communications infrastructure that is less centralized / vulnerable to state surveillance and other common attacks.

32 points by uladzislau 14y ago

dmix 14y ago

Non-mobile version with graphics: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/after-cyberattack-sven-olaf-kamphuis-is-at-heart-of-investigation.html?hp&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/after-cybe...

zimbatm 14y ago

> Spamhaus acted, he wrote, “without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers ..." That's the issue. It sucks to wake up one day and find out that your mail server has been blacklisted. All your customers are now affected and it's too late. If they added whole IP blocks to the list it might be even more annoying. That said it's not like Spamhaus is charging you to be removed from their list, it just takes a little bit of time once you cleanup. http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/Spamhaus%20SBL#137 http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/Spamhaus%20SBL#137

nsns 14y ago
Very good overview of Spamhous' practices in Ars today (http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/when-spammers-go-to-war-behind-the-spamhaus-ddos/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/when-spammers-go-to-...).
- kevingadd 14y ago
  Some of the behaviors described by Ars definitely sound shady to me; big ISP doesn't agree with you on the definition of illegal behavior, or in fact insists that local laws obligate them to protect their customers, so you blacklist the entire ISP? Complete nonsense. Feels to me like Spamhaus' operators understand that they now have a big hammer to swing (due to their popularity) so they use it freely to punish anyone they consider to be an 'evildoer', regardless of the collateral damage. If I were a customer of that ISP, I wouldn't be blaming the ISP, I'd be blaming Spamhaus. It also makes me wonder: How legit are the people running Spamhaus? If someone decides he wants to make a quick buck, is it possible for him to just arbitrarily add a site's IP ranges to the routing blacklist, and then send the site's operators a cash demand, like DDOS operators sometimes do?
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Disagree all you want, but that's definitely not nonsense. The way the Internet has worked since day 1 is as a bunch of relatively independent groups deciding who they'll talk to and in what fashion. If a bunch of people don't want to talk to your ISP because of who the ISP hosts, that seems pretty sensible to me. And if they have decided to trust Spamhaus to make those calls, that also seems reasonable. Supposing you get your wish and Spamhaus disappears tomorrow. What's your proposed solution? With the kind of money that on-line crime like spamming and phishing makes, it's easy enough to find somewhere to buy protection from law enforcement. Or just buy laws. Either we decide not to talk to the bad neighborhoods, or the globally connected nature of the Internet means that we all live in the worst neighborhood.
    - kevingadd 14y ago
      When did I say Spamhaus should go away? Anyway, you're missing my point: Why on earth do you have to blacklist the entire ISP to deal with one customer? Presumably if you are certain that one specific customer is to blame, and you're demanding that customer be disconnected, you know which IPs the customer is using and you can block them. Or you are otherwise able to identify the customer, say through headers - in which case, you should filter those headers. Blacklisting the ISP should only be necessary if the ISP is intentionally helping its customer obscure their identity and disguising spammy/malicious traffic as normal traffic. There is no excuse for punishing innocent web users and businesses for the actions of third parties, or for holding those innocents hostage in order to force their ISP to do something you want. The fact that the ISP later complained to the authorities suggests to me that this is exactly what happened. Is it really impossible from a technical perspective to do anything other than blackhole the entire ISP? I'll admit I'm not an expert on IPv4, but that seems implausible to me. The problem with these policies and principles you're defending is that they can be equally applied to innocents in order to do harm. I'm not claiming I have some perfect alternative; I am merely pointing out that Spamhaus' means don't seem legitimate, even if their ends are legitimate. And in this case, the legitimacy of the ends can come into question as well. There's a gray area between obvious spam (penis pills, etc) and obvious solicited mail (personal mails between individuals) - Twitter sends me emails regularly containing tweets by people I follow, because I have an account, but I never solicited that email. Is it spam? What if there are other people who do want those emails, even if I don't? Is it really appropriate to blacklist Twitter? The Twitter example isn't a fantasy, either; Gmail automatically started sending those things to my Spam folder without my intervention, and I've seen it do that to other content in the past. Would you be happy if Spamhaus added the IP ranges of businesses and ISPs you interact with to its blacklists? What if they blacklisted your home ISP?
gav 14y ago
I've never had a problem with Spamhaus, it's straightforward enough to get removed from the list if needed. It's way worse dealing with providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo who arbitrarily block mail. I'd argue that 99% of businesses are better served letting a third-party deal with marketing and transactional emails and only use outgoing SMTP for their own emails.
corresation 14y ago
That isn't the issue however as it is a voluntary list: they don't actually block anything, but those who trust their process block based upon that list. The difference is small but enormous, and if they were sloppy with their list people wouldn't use it.
blatherard 14y ago
You left off three words from the quote in the NYTimes article. "...and Jew lies" This is quite the omission. The full quote is 'Spamhaus acted, he wrote, “without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.” When I read that, I get a very different picture than simply one of an aggrieved businessman working in a grey area.
- zimbatm 14y ago
  Exactly my aim. The angle I wanted to take was just spam-haus related and didn't want to introduce Semitic argumentation. I'm not trying to defend Mr. Kamphuis, just taking a different angle since the press seem to be unilateral.
onemorepassword 14y ago
I've heard the same argument time and time again when I was still working for an ISP and involved in spam-fighting back in the 90's. Reality is, you have to totally ignore complaint after complaint about spam coming from your network before you end up on any blacklist. Most common form of negligence often came from some management decision to let role accounts like abuse@ get handled by non-technical communication or support people with zero authority to escalate the problem. If that still happens in 2013, fuck them. Bottom line is that only willful negligence or deliberate support to spammers can get you blacklisted. If you are in no hurry to remove spammers, don't expect Spamhaus e.a. to be in any hurry to un-blacklist you.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  The problem is that the blacklists have no problem with harming the customers of the network, who have done nothing wrong.

nlh 14y ago

Note to those of you who have, plan to, or might possibly have any sort of agenda about anything in your lives: Raw, brutish racism/culturalism doesn't help your message. At all. I read a line like this: "Spamhaus acted, he wrote, 'without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.'" And regardless of whether he's right or not about Spamhaus, his credibility in my eyes has gone straight to absolute zero.

nonamegiven 14y ago
It's amazing to me that anyone speaking that point of view has any credibility at all. With anyone.
socillion 14y ago
> And regardless of whether he's right or not about Spamhaus, his credibility in my eyes has gone straight to absolute zero. Wasn't that entirely the point of the article, to attack his character? If he was some lawyer stiff, people wouldn't be reading this - they enjoy reading content-light articles that spin caricatures of charismatic individuals. Assange all over again! It's hardly debatable whether he would have gotten media exposure like this if he didn't behave in such a manner; I think that overall this exposure will help his cause, not hurt it. Even if a majority discard STOPhaus claims immediately on the basis that their spokesman appears to be a nut, the minority dwarfs anything they would have reached otherwise. tl;dr you only saw this message because it was raw, brutish, and insensitive.
onemorepassword 14y ago
In this particular case, it has less to do with racism/antisemitism and more with conspiracy paranoia.

codezero 14y ago

“Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project ‘spamhaus.org,’ which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the Internet,” Nobody is forced to use Spamhaus, right? They aren't dictating what is on the Internet, they are offering a list to filter what they think is junk and people can choose to use that or not. Also, I am curious, did he ever care about Spamhaus before he started to get included in their blacklists?

contingencies 14y ago

The real problem with spam is that there is no presently widespread, realistic alternative to email in the field of P2P store and forward communications infrastructure that is less centralized / vulnerable to state surveillance and other common attacks.