[63754] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr.)
Thu Oct 9 20:45:14 2003
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 19:44:35 -0500
From: "Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr." <larrysheldon@cox.net>
To: Margie Arbon <margie@mail-abuse.org>
Cc: Susan Harris <srh@merit.edu>, NANOG <nanog@merit.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Margie Arbon wrote:
> I am curious as to why open proxies, compromised hosts, trojans and
> routing games are not considered operational issues simply because
> the vehicle being discussed is spam.
>
> With all due respect, we have a *problem*. End user machines on
> broadband connections are being misconfigured and/or compromised in
> frightening numbers. These machines are being used for everything
> from IRC flooder to spam engines, to DNS servers to massive DDoS
> infrastructure. If the ability of a teenager to launch a gb/s DDoS,
> or of someone DoSing mailservers off the internet with a trojan that
> contains a spam engine is not operational, perhaps it's just me
> that's confused.
>
> Two-three years ago the warnings were ignored because it was only
> IRC. Now it's only spam. What does it take to make the Network
> Operators and NANOG decide that things that are a "very bad thing" on
> one protocol generally can bite you later on another if you ignore it
> because it's only <insert your least favorite program or protocol
> here>?
I believe that to be one of the most succint summaries of the issues
as I have read.
