Blocked IP after Blocked IP - The Renewed Spam War

[greeneagle]

Current Events-1

Blocked IP after Blocked IP

Current events indicate that the SPAM WAR has never battled it out this hard on the “IP Blocking” forefront before.

I know it comes as a great surprise to many of us that the “Can Spam Act” didn’t work.

In the last couple of weeks many IPs have been blocked by responsible ISPs and Hosting Entities.

That was just real rude for them to take such a dim view of SPAM, Viruses, Phishing games and etc, collecting "Collateral Damage" along the way, wasn’t it?

All at once, in the last 2 weeks:

We are talking clients that do business globally with respected hosts and ISP's but suddenly they can’t receive emails from certain client’s. We have even fallen into the abyss of clients that can no longer send emails and expect them to be seen by the recipient because someone else "Trampled" their space.

We are talking about big players here:

SBCGlobal
GoDaddy
IPowerWeb
Yahoo
Time Warner
RigZone

These aren’t small players and I can almost guarantee there is a HARD SURGE to block shady IP’s coming on right now in respoinse to the multi-month proliferation of spam based images to try and bypass the filters.

I’d like to take this thread through resolutions, if we can.

Blocked IPs aren’t good for ongoing communications, web traffic or business.

Ken

[kgun]

Hi Ken,
Good to see you back.

1. I agree. Blocked IP's are not good for communication and the internet.
2. Sometimes, it is, especially for small companies with limited resources, the least of two evils to block IP's or use other, not so efficient filters.

Related WPW posts:

• Updated .htaccess to Block spammers / scammers.
• An interesting test.

This seems like a never ending Marathon race. It costs you hours of work, takes away foccus, steals bandwith and is a great inconvinience loss for smaller companies. Tell me a better way to do it for small companies with limited resources.

Economic concequences:

1. How shall you mesasure the effect of decreased cash flow (increased costs and decreased income)?
2. What is the present value of the long term economic loss and degraded brand?
3. Let us say that it costs the average Web Master two hours a week to get rid of spam in various forms. Then you can use an average hourly pay and costs and multipy that with an estimate of how many web masters that are effected. Then multipy that amount with x years and compute the present value.

My estimate is an accumulated loss over 20 years that amounts to more than a trillion USD.

These attacks are terrorizing small companies. Some may give up their internet business.

Now I can tell you the following. I do not know if you remember the meta description tag thread here at WPW. At the same time I noted a remarked degrading of my site that had a top rating on an important Norwegian portal. It may be a coincidence, but I am not borne yesterday. I contacted the owner of the portal and asked how the rating was computed. He said that a person could vote again after some hours. My site got remarkably many votes during a very short time interval, without a similar increased voting on the other sites on the same rating page. Then the voting suddenly stopped. My site had a top rating of 10. It was not difficult to figure out that some persons started to give a vote of 1 (an equation with one unknown). Today that site has the lowest rating on that rating site.

Some persons may be satisfied with their job so long.

[greeneagle]

kgun,

Good to see you hanging here still!

You are "dead on" about detracting time. GoDaddy has a strict No-Nonsense policy about SPAM. Many responsible ISPs and Hosting companies are stepping up to the plate and taking this issue into their own hands after the dismal failure (that many of us predicted) of the "Can SPAM Act". They are taking RSS and XML feeds from SPAM reporting outfits and banning IP after IP!

We are splayed out in a reconciliation play between the largest "Oil & Gas Industry Portal" and one of the primary and largest hosting companies, right now.

Who gets paid for that?

These are not fun games.... I don't recommend it for the faint of heart!

As in this case, the "offending party" didn't really offend at all.

Sometimes, it's just as simple as a mail server's setup needing adjustment.

LOL

Ken

[kgun]

It is a difficult trade off. Some of my policy is as follows:

1. Block unique IP's for months (permanently?), delete member and spam posts. That implies that internet cafe's may have their Ip's blocked. I think my forum is, in 99% of the cases, not aimed at people using the internet from those cafes.
2. Delete member if it is clear that (s)he breaks my forum rules in his/hers signature. Deleting a member is the easier part. Four clicks with the mouse. It takes much longer time to sign up again.
3. Delete post and member without argument if it is clear that the member has not read the forum rules. The member has to sign up again and (s)he will be deleted a second and third time if it is clear that (s)he does not still read the forum rules.
4. Block some Ip ranges for a time. Try to be as unpredictable as possible when I reopen an Ip (range). It is possible to randomize reopening of IP ranges. This is done in seconds (but still my time) when I edit .htaccess. I simply make the line a comment line using #. Just as fast to uncomment the IP range, a second, third and ... time. But still my time.
5. Worst case scenario when you go on holiday
   
   deny from 0.0.0.0/1
   
   Then you block (nearly) the world and can go to another planet or make an extranet for your customers :-)

P.S. I note that some of the smarter spammers come from GoDaddy. E.g.
Location: Japan.
Name when I look the site up on DnSstuff, American.
Email: Quite another place.

[kgun]

One positive effect of blocked IP's. Some of these domains will shut down and increase capacity for the serious webmasters.

In other words, it increases overall free bandwith capacity on the internet, decreases the burden on SE bots and make life easier for surfers.

In the end, the surfer is the boss.