[69295] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Anti-Spam Router -- opinions?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Crocker)
Mon Apr 5 11:43:55 2004
In-Reply-To: <000b01c41b1d$2a7c0970$a7a616cf@andyj>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
From: Matthew Crocker <matthew@crocker.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 11:43:17 -0400
To: "Andy Johnson" <andyjohnson@ij.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Apr 5, 2004, at 10:49 AM, Andy Johnson wrote:
>
> Has anyone had any experience with this device? Turntide.com. Looks
> like a
> traffic-shaping device designed specifically for cutting down spammers
> throughput to your inbound SMTP servers. My main concern is, how does
> it
> make the distinction between legitimate mass-mailings (e.g.: mailing
> lists
> such as this one), and spam? Interesting approach to killing spam
> though I
> must say.
>
Sounds like YABA (Yet Another Band Aid) solution for spam. If
rate-limiting the spam packets does an effective job at killing spam.
It will only make the spammers switch to a distrubuted attack method
using trojaned virus hosts sending 1 mail message at a time. They are
already doing this in some cases. SPAM is a living breathing entity
that can learn and adapt. The smarter the network gets at killing it
off, the smarter it gets in attacking. The evolution of spam/viruses
is astounding and getting quicker all the time. The turntide box may
be a good solution but it is expensive, I'll wait for the SNORT
add-on that does the same thing ;)
-Matt
