How Spammers Fool Spam Blacklists - And How to Stop Them

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore. Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be. One method used to combat spam is blacklisting. The goal of blacklisting is to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to crack-down on customers who send spam. A blacklisted ISP is blocked from sending email to organizations. When an ISP is blacklisted, they are provided with a list of actions they must take in order to be removed from the blacklist. This controversial method blocks not just the spammers, but all of the ISP’s customers. Blacklisting is generally considered an unfriendly approach to stopping spam because the users most affected by the blacklist are email users who do not send spam. Many argue blacklisting actually damages the utility of email more than it helps stop spam since the potential for blocking legitimate email is so high. In addition to the ethical considerations, there are other problems with blacklists. Many blacklists are not updated frequently enough to maintain effectiveness. Some blacklist administrators are irresponsible in that they immediately block suspect servers without thoroughly investigating complaints or giving the ISP time to respond. Another downside is that blacklists are not accurate enough to catch all spam. Only about half of servers used by spammers, regardless of how diligent the blacklist administrator may be, are ever cataloged in a given blacklist. Blacklists are used because they can be partially effective against spammers who repeatedly use the same ISP or email account to send spam. However, because spammers often change ISPs, re-route email and hijack legitimate servers, the spammer is a moving target. Blacklist administrators are forced to constantly revise lists, and the lag-time between when a spammer begins using a given server and when the blacklist administrator is able to identify the new spam source and add it to the blacklist allows spammers to send hundreds of millions of emails. Spammers consider this constant state of flux a part of doing business and are constantly looking for new servers to send spam messages. When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Blacklists have some utility in stopping known spammers, but they may also block valid emails. Because of their limitations, blacklist data should only be used in conjunction with other sources to determine if a given message is spam. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. The Solution Reputation systems offer a comprehensive anti spam solution by dynamically updating black and whitelists based on sender behavior. These systems also automatically update and score messages thereby removing the burden from administrators. Today’s spammers are more clever than ever, so today’s reputation systems must be equally sophisticated. An effective reputation system must be dynamic, comprehensive, precise, and based on actual enterprise mail traffic in order to keep the spammers from gaining any advantage. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

About the author:
Paul Judge, CTO, CipherTrust, Inc.
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
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Spammer in the Slammer: Jeremy Jaynes Sentenced to Nine Years

Will other spammers take heed? Don’t count on it. Jeremy Jaynes was on top of the world. By age 28, he owned a million-dollar home, a high-class restaurant, a chain of gyms and countless other toys. Yet those were only the spoils of his main line of business, which was swindling innocent people out of their money through email scams. From an unassuming house serving as his company’s headquarters in Raleigh, NC, Jaynes sent an estimated ten million messages a day pitching products most recipients didn't want, amassing an estimated $24 million fortune in the process. Using aliases such as Jeremy James and Gaven Stubberfield, Jaynes spammed his way up to the 8 position on Spamhaus’ Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) and grossed as much as $750,000 a month, allowing him to live like a king. However, Jaynes ran head-on into an information superhighway road block when a Virginia judge sentenced him to nine years in prison for his November 2004 conviction on felony charges of using false IP addresses to send mass email advertisements (some just call it spamming). The conviction was a landmark decision, as Jaynes became the first person in the United States convicted of felony spam charges. Though his operation was based in North Carolina, Jaynes was tried in Virginia because it is home to a large number of the routers that control much of North America's Internet traffic (it’s also the home of AOL and a government building or two). He should’ve Used the Privacy Software During the trial, prosecutors focused on three of Jaynes’ most egregious scams: software that promised to protect users' private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a work-from-home "FedEx refund processor" opportunity that promised $75-an-hour work but did little more than give buyers access to a website of delinquent FedEx accounts. Sound familiar? Anyone with an e-mail address has received countless messages originating from Jaynes’ operation. (If you’re still waiting on your privacy software to show up, it’s probably safe to stop checking the mailbox.) Jaynes got lists of millions of email addresses through a stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained e-mail addresses of eBay users. While the prosecutors still don't know how Jaynes got access to the lists, the Associated Press reported that the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses that an AOL software engineer has been charged with stealing. When Jaynes’ operation was raided, investigators found that the house from which he ran his operation was wired with 16 T-1 lines (a large office building can get by on a single T-1 line for all its users). Investigators also entered into evidence to-do lists handwritten by Jaynes. Take a look at Jeremy Jayne's meticulously detailed lists at: * www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes1.JPG * www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes2.JPG * www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes3.JPG Good Work if You Can Get (Away With) It The economics of spamming makes Jaynes’ decision to build a career of it understandable, though not noble. Spammers work on the law of averages, which would seem like an odd strategy considering that the average response rate for a spam message is just one-tenth of one percent. However, once you do the math even this miniscule response rate can make one very wealthy very quickly. If a spammer sends one million messages pushing a product width a $40 profit, a response rate of 0.1 percent works out to 1000 customers, or $40,000 per million messages sent. Since each message costs only fractions of a penny to send, and Jaynes was sending literally billions of messages a year, it’s easy to see how he pulled in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead. Spammers have financial motivation to come up with innovative ways to avoid detection, and they have begun to join forces. But as spammers become savvier, the public is fighting back. Law enforcement has begun to crack down on internet criminals, like Jaynes, and corporations are taking measures to defend their inboxes using anti spam hardware. Law enforcement, coupled with the effectiveness of today's anti-spam systems, is introducing hesitation, uncertainty and fear for many would be spammers. As profitability decreases and risk of prosecution increases, many spammers will be forced to simply pack up and move on.

About the author:
Paul Judge, CTO, CipherTrust, Inc.
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
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How Spammers Fool Whitelists - And How to Stop Them

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore.

Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be.

One method used to combat spam is whitelisting. Whitelists are databases of trusted email sources. The list may contain specific email addresses, IP addresses or trusted domains. Emails received from a whitelisted source are allowed to pass through the system to the user’s email box. The list is built when users and email administrators manually add trusted sources to the whitelist. Once built, the catch-rate for spam can be close to 100%, however, whitelists produce an inordinate number of false positives.

It is virtually impossible to produce an exhaustive list of all possible legitimate email senders because legitimate email can come from any number of sources. To get around this difficulty, some organizations have instituted a challenge-response methodology. When an unknown sender sends an email to a user’s account, the system automatically sends a challenge back to the sender. Some challenge-response systems require the sender to read and decipher an image containing letters and numbers. The image is designed to be unreadable by a machine, but easily recognizable by a human. Spammers would not spend the time required to go through a large number of challenge-response emails, so they drop the address and move on to those users who don’t use such a system.

Whitelists are only partially successful and impractical for many users. For example, problems can arise when users register for online newsletters, order products online or register for online services. If the user does not remember to add the new email source to their whitelist, or if the domain or IP address is entered incorrectly, the communication will fail. Additionally, whitelists impose barriers to legitimate email communication and are viewed by some as just plain rude.

Whitelists are not widely used by email users and administrators as a primary tool to fight spam because of the high number of false positives, and the difficulties in creating a comprehensive list of email sources. Because whitelists are not widely used, spammers typically do not develop countermeasures. As with other spam fighting techniques, whitelists are most effective when used in conjunction with other anti-spam tools.

The Solution
When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

About the author:
Paul Judge, CTO, CipherTrust, Inc.
Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
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