[120316] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Arrogant RBL list maintainers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Wed Dec 16 07:47:57 2009
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 07:15:46 -0500
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <6eb799ab0912152212l793f2fd7jeabfb841c7b3b72f@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 12:12:22AM -0600, James Hess wrote:
> Many sites don't use names that will necessarily be meaningful to an outsider.
Then they should expect issues with mail acceptance by outsiders.
> Some sites might want to avoid certain "meaningful" RDNS entries
> since spammers, hackers, and other abusive users that scan IP ranges
> can utilize the RDNS to facilitate their activities.
This is nonsense. RDNS/DNS naming choices are a trivial obstacle to
spammers et.al. who went over this speed bump at 70 MPH years ago and
have been accelerating ever since. This kind of security-by-obscurity
tactic is far more likely to draw their attention than evade it, as any
site using it has in effect run up a large flag with "we don't understand
security basics" written on it and thus made itself an attractive target.
---Rsk
