[Scspamcop] Re: Fake emails claiming to be from support circulating.

[Miss Betsy]

"Twayne" <nobody at devnull.spamcop.net> wrote in message 
news:g563s3$guk$1 at news.spamcop.net...
> It IS interesting how the WAL (sorry, World At Large) just doesn't give a 
> schlitz about spam period, let alone the dangerous and bombastic types 
> mired in social engineering. <snip>  I've always thought education was the 
> key to defending against and beating a lot of these bass turds, but over 
> the last few months I've changed my mind; there is something, I don't know 
> what, that has to come first, before the education, so people *will* 
> decide the education is worth having.  It's sure not being made easily 
> available to any newbie or even a lot of experienced newbies, for that 
> matter.

For one thing, the techies have a hard time communicating with customers and 
marketing types.  As a result, the techies give up and use filters to screen 
out as much spam as possible - free accounts like yahoo and hotmail not 
particularly caring whether good mail is lost or not in the process.  People 
think the problem is more or less solved.

IMHO, a 'Ralph Nader' needs to 'raise consumer consciousness' about how 
consumers can get reliable email service.

>
> As for teaming up against the zombie bots, I would *love* to!  But 
> historically I've never even been able to engage anyone knowledgeable to 
> even discuss the isssues.  But, I'm not even sure anymore how to tell 
> who's a zombie and who isn't, or even how to guess at it.
>   IF there is ever a legal and mostly ethical attack begun against 
> zombies, I'm there! All I need is an invite.    But I seriously doubt I'll 
> see anything happening more effective than the toothless stuff I saw about 
> a year ago when I tried to research the area.
>   Too bad there can't be a zombie.spamcop group.

My understanding (which may be way off the mark) is that zombies normally do 
not send through mail servers, but manage to use another port.  I read a 
post sometime a while back where the poster was a email server admin.  He 
had his email servers clean as a whistle, but I believe it was the computer 
that did the incoming virus checking was also the computer that any infected 
machine connected to, to reach the internet.  He didn't care if that IP 
address was blocked all over the place because it never handled incoming 
email.  Other email admins also 'poke' holes for Comcast email servers and 
block all the rest of the Comcast IP range because there are so many zombies 
on Comcast.

Recently one of my email accounts started to filter email which I opted out 
of.  However, the amount of spam received has been reduced dramatically.  My 
theory is that incoming email server admins use blocklists that list zombies 
to block those IP addresses at the server level where naturally the spam 
disappears since there is no way for the sending computer to accept incoming 
email.  They may not even have to use blocklists, if the 'handshake' 
sequence isn't normal.  But I don't know enough about the technical details.

Back to the 'consumer consciousness'  - I know a lot of people who use 
comcast and they would be horrified to know that Comcast (or the anonymous 
server admin above) allows zombies to send porn spam.  Others would be 
horrified that nobody is warning those with infected computers.  With the 
right PR, Comcast would have to do something to notify customers that their 
computers are zombies and stop them from accessing the internet until clean. 
And that would get more people involved in being educated in safe surfing - 
so that they don't lose internet access.

Miss Betsy