Spammers hapless fate = ISP toil and sweat

On 17-Sep-97 Nick Hilliard wrote:
> I'm almost surprised that spammers haven't cottoned on to this yet -- they
> could inject some temporary routes into the internet, use hosts on these
> address ranges to bounce their spam off a 3rd-party relay site and then
> withdraw the announcements.  This would be almost totally untraceable and
> would circumvent routing black holes completely -- for those who are using
> routing black holes to try to control spamming.
> 
> DNS for these addresses could be set up with an extremely short TTL, if
> necessary.

Scary thoughts, Nick. :-(

The only thing they do so far is to register as many domain names with
random characters at the InterNIC as possibly, and spam from these domains
(you can get a reply for those domains to test out how well your "spamming
success rate" went). As you know, the InterNIC takes some time to setup
a domain name, then some time more to bill you, and some weeks until they
decide that the customer is not going to pay and unregister the domain.

But in the mean while the spamming companies have a "window" of about one
month to six weeks during which they have a "valid" temporary domain to
spam and use as feedback. The best thing being that after a few weeks the
domain name disappears anyway and you can't fight back/protest/whatever.

Your trick manipulating router tables at the backbone is too scary to
contemplate.

I fail to understand from where these guys get Internet connectivity.
It would violate almost any AUP I know of...

        - Luis

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\       Esoterica - Novas Tecnologias de Informacao, SA
:-)     Luis Miguel Sequeira
/___,   lms at esoterica.pt         http://www.esoterica.pt/