re: [LI] LI Stall projects

["Smeagol Gollum" <smeagol@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A mail I just sent Atul Chitnis - for the general comments of the list.  
All help appreciated and solicited.  You people are the small 
majority of people clued enough to appreciate this danger.

> Please keep discussing and suggesting. I will probably not be able to
> read my mail (apparently the connectivity isn't too great where we are
> going) until Wednesday, so please don't don't assume that we lost
> interest! ;-) Jessie and KD of ILUG-BLR will continue to coordinate
> matters.

--------

Hello

We at the Coalition Against Unsolicited E-Mail ( CAUCE - 
http://www.cauce.org ) have recently formed a chapter in India.  

Briefly, CAUCE is a voluntary organization dedicated to fighting 
spam (unsolicited commercial / bulk email).  

We would like to give a short presentation (or request you people - 
especially the Bangalore Linux User Group) to focus on this at the 
IT.COM expo.   

India is a ticking time bomb - with a huge number of anonymous 
open relays (mostly outdated sendmail boxes, insecure Exchange / 
cc:Mail networks ...) ready and waiting for the first spammer to 
misuse them.  

- From my participation in various anti spam groups, and my 
personal experience, India is, sadly, becoming a favourite hunting 
ground for spammers searching for open relay SMTP servers to 
relay their spam through.  

Recent examples include -

- ---------------

[1] BARC - the most well documented case.  MilW0rm used several 
well documented security holes in the ancient version of sendmail 
BARC was running to break in, delete mails etc etc.  

[2] tifr.res.in (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research)- 

SMI/SVR4, AIX 3.x etc boxes, recently hit by a spammer - leading 
to a server crash.  The spammer has since been identified by a 
member of the SpamL mailing list [*] and I have passed this info to 
TIFR's syadmin for further action.  

[*] SpamL - spam-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is an anti spam list of 
mail admins / sysadmins of ISPs (like Earthlink / Digex / PSI) / 
backbone providers (UUNet) / Web hosts (Verio / Concentric etc) .... 
as well as ordinary users who are concerned about the spam 
problem.  

[3] kar.kar.nic.in (National Informatics Center, Bangalore) 

SMI/SVR4 box - hit by a spammer.  and listed on an anti spam 
blacklist called the MAPS RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) 
<http://maps.vix.com/rbl/candidacy.html> which shut them off from 
over 40% of the Internet.  

They have now (after I pointed them to a few resources re this) 
upgraded their box to sendmail 8.9.3 and will shortly be delisted 
from the RBL.  

[3] giascla.vsnl.net.in - VSNL Calcutta - SMI/SVR4 box.  No response
from them yet (even after forwarding a copy with full headers) of the
spam, info on how to close their open relays etc etc.  Listed in the 
RBL - Part of VSNL Calcutta cut off from 40% of the Internet.

[4] mailbg.vsnl.net.in - VSNL Bangalore.  SMI/SVR4 or even older 
version of sendmail.  No response yet - same as their colleagues in 
Calcutta.   

etc etc etc.  

- ----------------

> We would like to give a short presentation (or request you people -
> especially the Bangalore Linux User Group) to focus on this at the 
> IT.COM expo.  

I hope you see the urgency of this problem and will help me (or 
rather the entire Internet community in India) in this matter.  

Suresh Ramasubramanian | CAUCE India | http://www.cauce.org 
Suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Suresh@xxxxxxxxxxx 
Phone: +(91-40)3736553/3745398 | eFax: +(1-603)590-5437 
Stop Spam | Join CAUCE | http://www.cauce.org  

---s



Smeagol Gollum | Smeagol@xxxxxxxxxxxx | (aka) Suresh R.
http://www.kcircle.com | http://www.angen.net/~pegasus/
Phone: +(91-40)3736553/3745398 | eFax: +(1-603)590-5437
Headline for the day:
   Miners refuse to work after death

--------------------------------------------------------------------
The Linux India Mailing List Archives are now available.  Please search
the archive at http://lists.linux-india.org/ before posting your question
to avoid repetition and save bandwidth.