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Anti-Spam Blocklists DDoSed Down

At least three anti-spam blocklists were taken down this week by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks: Spamhaus, CBL, and APEWS. The first two are back up; the third is not.

The Composite Blocking List (CBL) currently has this at the top of its home page:

Important Information on Spamhaus/CBL DDOS

Commencing March 19 the CBL was hit by a very large-scale distributed denial of service attack. At the time of writing (March 21, 00:15 UTC) this attack is still ongoing.

Throughout this period the CBL DNSBL has continued to remain available through the CBL mirrors and via Spamhaus XBL (and Zen), and we've been doing our utmost to restore the rest.

Access to the lookup/removal page has just been restored.

The CBL rsync facility has been restored.

Email to the CBL is not working yet.

We ask for your patience while we finish restoring the rest of the CBL to service.

SpamRankings.net is receiving CBL data normally again, although yesterday's is lost.

We never saw any interruption in data from the Passive Spam Block List (PSBL).

Spamhaus says it got a 75Gbps DDoS attack, according to Liam Tung with CSO Online (Australia) today:

Current security models broken; need resilience; how about reputation?

Bruce Schneier asserted yesterday that Our Security Models Will Never Work — No Matter What We Do. After detailing why he thinks that (the bad guys can get new techonology faster and have fewer restrictions on using it), he summarized:

As it gets easier for one member of a group to destroy the entire group, and the group size gets larger, the odds of someone in the group doing it approaches certainty. Our global interconnectedness means that our group size encompasses everyone on the planet, and since government hasn't kept up, we have to worry about the weakest-controlled member of the weakest-controlled country. Is this a fundamental limitation of technological advancement, one that could end civilization? First our fears grip us so strongly that, thinking about the short term, we willingly embrace a police state in a desperate attempt to keep us safe; then, someone goes off and destroys us anyway?

If security won't work in the end, what is the solution?

An Eerie Silence on Cybersecurity

Apparently it takes an alleged Chinese threat to get the New York Times to notice Internet security problems. The Times has escalated from a recent article to an editorial.

NYTimes Editorial 26 February 2013, An Eerie Silence on Cybersecurity, notes a few exceptions, and then remarks:

American companies have been disturbingly silent about cyberattacks on their computer systems — apparently in fear that this disclosure will unnerve customers and shareholders and invite lawsuits and unwanted scrutiny from the government.

In some cases, such silence might violate the legal obligations of publicly traded companies to share material information about their businesses. Most companies would tell investors if an important factory burned to the ground or thieves made off with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.

Maybe it's better to have a prescribed burn of released breach information than to have a factory fire of unprescribed released information.

Why don't companies do this?

Companies fear reputation for bad security

As more companies come out of the closet about their Internet security being compromised, still more start to admit it. But many (perhaps most) don't even know. Fortunately, there is a way the public can get a clue even about those companies.

Nicole Perlroth wrote for the NYTimes 20 February 2013 that corporations try to hide successful cracking of their Internet security:

Most treat online attacks as a dirty secret best kept from customers, shareholders and competitors, lest the disclosure sink their stock price and tarnish them as hapless.

However, as some companies come out of the closet about this (Twitter, Facebook, Apple, etc.) and such

revelations become more common, the threat of looking foolish fades and more companies are seizing the opportunity to take the leap in a crowd.

“There is a ‘hide in the noise' effect right now,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a nonprofit security research and education organization. “This is a particularly good time to get out the fact that you got hacked, because if you are one of many, it discounts the starkness of the announcement.”

Now here's the interesting part:

Primus dropped out of January 2013 Canada SpamRankings.net

The big winner was AS 7788 MAGMA-COMM, which dropped from #3 to #147 by decreasing from millions to less than a thousand spam messages in the January 2013 for Canada. Magma had a brief spate of Kelihos spam in the middle of the month, but it only lasted less than a week. Almost as good was AS 6407 PRIMUS-AS6407, dropping from millions the previous month to a few hundred thousand, and from #6 to #11. That one while beating its Kelihos problem, seems to have developed a Cutwail problem, which was sending increasingly more spam at the end of the month. Since Magma was bought by Primus in 2004, Primus gets double congratulations!

-jsq

Belgium: Easyhost still bad, Nucleus climbing, Stone dropped out in January 2013 SpamRankings.net

Easyhost's AS 49512 tripled its spam, sending 97% of the total top 10 spam in the January 2013 for Belgium. Easyhost did start dropping in the last week. Nucleus BVBA's AS 39318 came up from nowhere to #2 with more than a million spam messages, mostly in the last week. And Stone Internet Services' AS 39234 dropped like a rock, from 9,149 spam messages last month for #8, to only 2,944 this month and #20.

-jsq

DorukNet outspammed Turkey again in January 2013 SpamRankings.net

For two months in a row, DorukNet's AS 8685 has spammed the most in the January 2013 for Turkey from CBL data. Before that, it was #6 in November 2012 and also #6 April 2011.

In April 2011 the problem was apparently Lethic with a max of 87,852 on 1 April 2011. DorukNet seemed to have a bit of maazben, cutwail, etc. at that time, but very little compared to Lethic.

In November 2012 the problem was apparently Kelihos with a max of 299,873 on 7 November 2012.

This recent DorukNet peak that looks like Mt. Ararat was up to 13,569,282 on 18 January 2013, apparently from darkmailer2. DorukNet is actually improving since that peak, but meanwhile it managed to increase its December spam total of 54,803,032 to 324,544,788 in January 2013.

January 2013 SpamRankings.net

Most worsened: AS 10297 COLUMBUSNAP , from #91 to #6 worldwide in January 2013. Most improved: AS 48347 MTW-AS , from #8 to less than 250. Surprise entrant: AS 8685 DORUKNET . Still #1 for fourth month: AS 16276 OVH .

-jsq

Darkmailer2 month in Canada December 2012 SpamRankings.net

It's apparently Darkmailer2 month in Canada. One company got a grip on it, and two got much worse, in the December 2012 for Canada.

AS 7788 MAGMA-COMM, bought in 2004 by PRIMUS Telecommunications Group, peaked in the second week and then got a grip on its darkmailer2 spamming. AS 11342 PATHWAY really gave AS 32613 IWEB-AS a run for its money; both seem to have a darkmailer2 problem. Pathway went from 2,871 spam messages seen by CBL in November 2012 to 21,593,775 in December 2012: that's 7,521 times. However, iWeb once again won the spam-spewing month in Canada!

Congratulations to the four dropouts, especially AS 16532 ASB2B2C, which