Spam: March 2007 Archives
Adam has pointed out that SEC are planning on planning on taking action to combat the pump and dump spams doing the rounds. So far trading in 35 companies has been suspended in the aptly named "Operation Spamalot".
It is a logical step to take in order to curb the amount of such spams going out, however you would have to wonder how long before spammers twist the situation to their advantage? Blackmail anyone?
A while ago Michele blogged about generating stats from Rbldnsd. Since then I've had to put it into practice.
During the post he mentioned Jeff Chan's script for getting the numbers from rbldnsd's stats file. The only problem with this script was that it rapidly ran out of steam when you went over ten zones. This becomes a problem when you consider that a dnsbl like countries.nerd.dk has over 200 zones.
A new script was created in order to get around this limitation, which is available here. If no argument is passed to the script, it will return the aggregate numbers for all the zones, and if the zone name is passed in as an argument it will give the numbers for that zone. In both cases it will return two lines. The first is the number of positve hits on the zone, the second line is the total number of requests to the zone.
In order to use the script with mrtg you will have to edit the $statfile variable to point at where rbldnsd is outputting it's stats. For each DNSBL, you have to setup a target in your MRTG config. The target for sbl.spamhaus.org would be:
Target[sbl.spamhaus.org]: `perl /etc/mrtg/rbldnsdstat.pl sbl.spamhaus.org` MaxBytes[sbl.spamhaus.org]: 4800000 Title[sbl.spamhaus.org]: RBLDNSD - sbl.spamhaus.org PageTop[sbl.spamhaus.org]: <H1>sbl.spamhaus.org requests </H1>MRTG should then be run every five minutes using cron.
According to greatfirewallofchina.org, Chinese citizens are unable to get to my blog. Not that this bothers me all that much. What is strange, is that Akismet is catching plenty of spam comments coming from Chinese ip space. Chinese spammers are also having no problem sending lots of spam email.
Are the spammers in China just technically advanced enough to get past the Great Firewall? Or do the Chinese authorities not care about spam traffic? All this is making my decision to drop all email from China at MTA time seem a lot more reasonable.
I mentioned last week how I managed to recieve a unsolicated message on my phone from vkap.net. Since the message was not a SMS, but rather a service message, Vodafone couldn't give me the five digit number which RegTel require in order to do anything about it.
The solution as it turns out is to contact the office of the Data Protection Commissioner. They can act on any complaints about unsolicited spam messages. Details for how to procede with reporting the spam are here.
Since I did the original post, I have gotten a lot of hits from other European countries. For these visitors, I can only suggest that you contact your local Data Protection Commissioner.
