|
Since the SoBig.F worm took over so many systems, many news sources reported those zombie machines have now launched a coordinated attack against all Spam Blacklist providers.
Spam Blacklist services collect information on the sources of Spammers (those who are sending massive amounts of Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail - UCE), and make this information available to governments, organizations, and commercial enterprises, so they can compare incoming e-mail against these sources, and identify spam - and discard it. This process is very popular, keeps usually between 30% - 40% of Spam from their users, and decreases the load on e-mail servers.
The coordinated attacks have caused two such Blacklist Providers to cease operations (Osirusoft, Monkeys.com), and are threatening all others. Their availability is critical to all the blacklist users, their failure causes wide-spread e-mail outages.
The SANS Institute reports on September 26th, 2003:
Spam Blacklist Sites Down After Denial-of-Service Attacks
Two websites that post spam blacklists are no longer running because of massive denial-of-service attacks launched against them. In addition, an ISP took a spam blacklist offline after it saw signs of an attack.
referring to news articles from NewsFactor (article link, PDF) and Computerworld (article link, PDF).
Besides the iSecure protection for Spamhaus and SORBS/SPEWS by Melior, we have also extended the offer to Monkeys.net (Ron Guilmette).
|
