When Zombies Get Stealthy
from the ruh-roh dept
Rather than really deal with the issue of computers taken over by zombies/trojans, many ISPs have simply chosen to block port 25 for their customers, meaning that they can't use any kind of 3rd party mail server. One way around this has been to just use a VPN of some kind to encrypt the traffic, and then the ISP has no clue if the traffic going over the network is email or something entirely different. Of course, it's not all that hard to predict the obvious next step: zombie botnets get encrypted themselves in order to hide the malicious traffic from peeping ISP eyes. This could make it a lot more difficult to spot -- and probably leads to the next step as well: ISPs blocking off even more, such as any kind of VPN setup. Won't that be fun?
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Blocking port 25 doesn't stop use of third-party m
(and SMTP AUTH to authenticate themselves.
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huh?
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No Subject Given
I'm sure the VPN software and even the botnets could just as easily begin switching their connections over to non-standard ports anyways.
This cat and mouse game can keep going until there are no ports left open, save for maybe port 80...
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You would think
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Re: You would think
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No Subject Given
To find the source you need to look at the headers (http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers.html) or use a service like www.spamcop.com and copy/paste it all into there.
If you complain to the proper ISP, that ISP gets tired of receiving complaints and should take action against their customer. One bot down, and therefore 10-100K email messages of spam are shot down.
Unless you want M$ to start charging for outgoing messages....
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