So a friend of mine posts (on Twitter) a great shot of a clueless phishing spammer:

So I reply:
@crankypotato Were only all such phishing spammers so clueless. (Were only all users clueful enough to notice …)

So some other scammer tries it out on me:
Max Dubberly  @Maxt4dxsviida
@rslade http://t.co/(dangerous URL that I’m not going to include, obviously)

I don’t know exactly where that URL redirects, but when I tried it, in a safe browser, Avast immediately objected …

Recently one of the bridges in my area was replaced by a new one.  The new Port Mann Bridge is, at the moment, apparently the widest in the world, and will relieve congestion on the existing bridge, which has been a huge bottleneck for years.  (Why do I keep flashing on an old saying about “traffic expands to fill anything made available for it …”?)

In order to pay for it, our currently right-wing) provincial government has formed a “public/private partnership” with a shell corporation (Treo) which gets to “lease” the bridge for about fifity years and put tolls on it.

I’m not sure I’ll have a lot of use for the Port Mann Bridge when it gets tolled (except to get out to the Olive Garden, until they build one closer in).  It’s been such a bottleneck for so long that I’ve found all kinds of ways to avoid it.  (There is another tolled bridge in the area, and I’ve only traveled over it once, in the first “free” week, just to find out where it was and went.)  But I figured I’d get the decal anyway, especially since it gets you a discount, and some extra bucks (equivalent to about 20 free trips) to start off.

You’ll have heard about the debacle in regard to the phone registration, where some of the clerks were in business for themselves, and stole credit card numbers.  So I figured I’d register via the Website.  The process wasn’t too arduous, although I found it odd that American Express, which I use for most of my pre-authorized charges, wasn’t acceptable.  (I also found out that my password algorithm, while it is long, complex, and uses mixed case and non-alphabetic characters, doesn’t generate a number in all cases.  Apparently you have to have a number.)

I didn’t realize that I didn’t get a confirmation email until this morning, when I checked the spam filters.  There it was.

And, I have to agree.  If I was a spam filter, I’d have said it was spam, too.  It’s a mess.  Looking at the body, I can’t make out anything it is trying to do (other than create all kinds of buttons).  The spam report says:
0.00 NO_REAL_NAME           From: does not include a real name
0.00 BSF_SC0_MISMATCH_TO    Envelope rcpt doesn’t match header
0.00 MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
0.00 URI_TRUNCATED          BODY: Message contained a URI which was truncated
0.00 HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message

Treo itself seems to use a system called Barracuda, and this system also scores the message as spam.  (It also seems to have an AV scanner, which appears to be turned off.  Apparently Treo is not concerned about sending viruses out to infect other people.)

So, the Treo people don’t seem to be very concerned about information security.  Which gets me thinking:

Is the bridge safe?

I’ve used Ad-Aware in the past, and had it installed on my machine.  Today it popped up and told me it was out of date.  So, at their suggestion, I updated to the free version, which is now, apparently, called Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+.  It provides for real-time scanning, Web browsing protection, download protection, email protection, and other functions.  Including “superfast” antivirus scanning.  I installed it.

And almost immediately removed it from the machine.

First off, my machine bogged down to an unusable state.  The keyboard and mouse froze frequently, and many programs (including Ad-Aware) were unresponsive for much of the time.  Web browsing became ludicrous.

There are some settings in the application.  For my purposes (as a malware researcher) they were inadequate.  There is an “ignore” list, but I was completely unable to get the program to “ignore” my malware zoo, even after repeated efforts.  (The interface for that function is also bizarrely complex.)  However, I’m kind of a non-typical user.  However, the other options would be of little use to anyone.  For the most part they were of the “on or off” level, and provide almost no granularity.  That makes them simple to use, but useless.

I’ve never used Ad-Aware much, but it’s disappointing to see yet another relatively decent tool “improved” into non-utility.

Like many other people, I try helping developing countries when I can. So to help boost GDP in Eastern Europe and Africa (or ‘redistribute the wealth’ if you will) here’s a quick tutorial that will help scammers get HSBC customers’ credit card numbers. All the steps below are done by the real HSBC, so you don’t even need to “fool” anyone.

An HSBC customer who has gone through this process before won’t be able to distinguish between you and the real HSBC. Customer that has not been through this process certainly won’t know better anyway. In fact, you can do it to HSBC employees and they won’t know.

All you need is a toll-free number for them to call (feel free to forward it to Nigeria). The nice thing about HSBC is that the process below is identical to how the real HSBC asks customers for information. In other words: HSBC is training their customers to follow this path. I propose a new term for HSBC’s method of breeding phish: spowning (spawn+p0wn).

Step 1:

Prepare an email that looks like:

Dear :

As a service to our customers and in an effort to protect their HSBC Premier  MasterCard  account, we are attempting to confirm recent charge activity or changes to the account.

Please contact the HSBC Premier Fraud Servicing Center to validate the activity at 1-888-206-5963 within the Continental United States. If you are calling from outside the United States, please call us collect at 716-841-7755.

If the activity is unauthorized, we will be able to close the account and reissue both a new account number and cards. Please use the Subject Reference Number below, when calling.

At HSBC, the security of our customer’s accounts has always been, and will continue to be a high priority. We appreciate your business and regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Security & Fraud Risk HSBC USA

Alert ID Number :  10917558

Note:  Emails sent to this repository will go unmonitored.  Please do not reply to this email. —————————————– ************************************************************** This e-mail is confidential. It may also be legally privileged. If you are not the addressee you may not copy, forward, disclose or use any part of it. If you have received this message in error, please delete it and all copies from your system and notify the sender immediately by return e-mail. Internet communications cannot be guaranteed to be timely, secure, error or virus-free. The sender does not accept liability for any errors or omissions. ************************************************************** “SAVE PAPER – THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT!”

Step 2:

Replace the phone numbers with your own. The above are HSBC’s.

Don’t worry about the ‘alert ID’. Just make something up. Unlike other credit cards, the caller (me, in this case) can’t use the alert ID to confirm this is really HSBC.

Step 3:

Blast this email. You’re bound to reach plenty of HSBC card holders. The rest you don’t care about anyway.

Main perk: Before the customer gets to speak to a human they need to enter full credit card number and 4 digit SSN. So even the most lazy scammer can at least get those.

For the overachieving scammers, have a human answer and ask for  Card expiration and Full name on the card before agreeing to answer any other questions from the customer. This is all standard procedure at HSBC so customers shouldn’t be suspicious.

Oh, and if the customer who happens to be a security blogger tries to authenticate you back, tell them to hang up and call the number on the back of their card. That will shut them up.

At HSBC, the security of our customer’s accounts has always been, and will continue to be a high priority.

If it really was, you wouldn’t make me such an easy target for scammers. But thanks for playing.

Well, I thought it was ironic that the biggest solar storm in years is hitting the earth tonight … while CanSecWest is on …

So far today we have had talks on security (and vulnerabilities) during the boot process, a talk on pen testing (and the presenter seemed to be alternately talking about how to choose a pen tester, and how to do pen testing), and social authentication.

The social authentication talk was by Alex Rice from Facebook.  He noted that, even though Facebook only challenges a small fraction of a percent of logins, given the user base that means more then a million every day.  When a login is challenged, a standard response has been the good old “security questions”: mother’s maiden name, birthdate, and other pieces of information that might not be too hard for someone intent on breaking into your account to find out.

Alex went through the limitations of security questions, and then moved to other possibilities.  Security questions comes under the heading of “things you know,” so they looked at “things you have.”  For example, you have to have an email address, so there is the possibility of a challenge sent to your email.  (Google, of course, figures that everyone in the world has a cell phone that can receive text messages.)

Recently, Facebook has started to use the photos that people post on their pages, particularly those that have been tagged.  Basically, if your login gets challenged, you will be shown a series of pictures, and you should be able to identify who is, or is not, in the picture, out of your list of friends.  This is the subject of a blog post noting that it isn’t perfect.

There are additional problems.  As the post notes, the situation is less than ideal if you have a huge number of “friends.”  (As Bruce Schneier’s new book notes, if you have more than 150 friends, you probably aren’t friends with many of them.)  Even if you do know your “friends,” there is nothing to say that any given picture of them will be recognizable.  In fact, since the system relies on tagging, there are going to be pictures of weird objects that people have deliberately tagged as themselves, in joking fashion.

Therefore, this system is definitely not perfect, as the questions at the end pointed out.  Unfortunately, Alex had passed, rather quickly, over an important point.  The intent of the system, in Facebook’s opinion, was to reduce the amount of account spam sent via accounts that had been compromised.  In that regard, the system probably works very well.  False logins get challenged.  Some of the challenges are false positives.  The photo system is a means of allowing a portion (a fairly large portion, probably) of users to recover their accounts quickly.  For the remaining accounts, there are other means to recover the account, even though these are more time-consuming for both Facebook and the user.  This system does reduce the total amount of time spent by both users (in the aggregate, even if individual users may feel hard done by) and Facebook.

Since most of my income comes from a company on the West Coast, I’m used to people assuming that I should be working according to their time zone (PST) rather than my own (GMT). But apparently we’re all wrong.
According to Trustwave’s Global Security Report:

“The number of executables and viruses sent in the early morning hours increased, eventually hitting a maximum between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time before tapering off throughout the rest of the day. The spike is likely an attempt to catch people as they check emails at the beginning of the day.”

Did I miss something? Has everyone but me moved to the East Coast? I’m not even sure it matters when you receive a malicious executable, unless you don’t get around to opening it until after your security software has been updated to detect it. However, the report also tells us that:

“The time from compromise to detection in most environments is about six months…”

So if evading AV software is really the point, this seems to suggest that all those people who’ve moved to the East Coast are coping even less effectively with their email than I am.

Hold on, though. Maybe this tells something about the blackhat’s time zone, rather than the victim’s? The report doesn’t seem to tell us anything about the geographical origin of the emails that Trustwave has tracked, but it does tells us that apart from the 32.5% of attacks in general that are of unknown origin, the largest percentage (29.6%) come from the Russian Federation. Russia actually covers no less than nine time zones (until a couple of years ago, it was eleven), but perhaps we can assume for the sake of argument that a high percentage of those attackers are in time zones between CET and Moscow Standard (now UTC+4), which applies to most of European Russia. (That assumption allows us to include Romania and the Ukraine.) Perhaps, after a hard morning administering botnets, Eastern European gangsters are best able to find time to fire off a few malicious emails between the afternoon samovar break and early evening cocktails. Convinced? No, me neither.

Actually, there are some interesting statistics in the report. If they’re reliable, some assumptions that we make about geographical distribution, for example, might bear re-examination. But I’d really have to suggest that journalists in search of something new to say about malware examine some of the report’s interpretations with a little more salt and scepticism. I suppose I should be grateful that no-one has noticed yet that according to the report, twice as many attacks originate in the Netherlands as do in China. Just think of the sub-editorial puns that could inspire…

David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
Small Blue-Green World/AVIEN
ESET Senior Research Fellow

And here, I thought I was finally famous.  It’s so disappointing.

I got a “Weekly Follow-up from the National Academic Association.”  I suppose it doesn’t really matter that I’d never heard of them, let alone weekly, because it came from the “Academic Association.”

“Hello Candidate,” it starts, and goes on to tell me that “As the school year opens, the Who’s Who Among Executives and Professionals begin a global search for accomplished individuals in both faculty and administrative roles at post-secondary institutions of learning.”

Could this possibly be a job offer?  They apparently need me to “verify your contact information so that we can properly publish your updated credentials alongside 30,000 of your prestigious peers. Such a listing can only bring you increased visibility and networking opportunities within the scholastic community.”  Only 30,000!  Such a select group!

Alas, when I actually went to the site http://www.wittersphere.info/YM40/53/1338/710177.1/4/13295/1600293/3O80?gy=?qqu06/vc/ld-99505.g78 (tested with a safe browser, but it doesn’t actually seem to be feeding malware) it turned out to be the “International Association of Successful Individuals.”  Therefore, I don’t qualify, but no doubt a number of you do, so I’m letting you know 

Got a message yesterday.  It was immediately suspect, since it purportedly came from YouTube, and was threatening that I had sent “the maximum number of messages per day.”  It was also sent to the “-owner” of a mailing list I run on Yahoo.  Of course, I don’t send email through YouTube.

However, since I do have a YouTube account, and just in case there was a mail capability I didn’t know about, I figured I’d better check it out.  Sending through Yahoo is a good form of obfuscation.  I did, eventually, figure out that it came via ThePlanet in Houston (probably a bot infected machine).

I then suspected that it might be some kind of account phishing.  However, when I actually looked at the URL, and checked it out, it seems to have been a simple pharma spam (bounced from a site in France to one in Russia).

All that trouble and obfuscation, just to post pharma spam?  Sophisticated misdirection kits are obviously getting cheaper and easier for the script kiddie level spammers to buy.

I’m not sure why I feel the urge to keep writing about comment spam: primarily, I suppose it’s because I get so much amusement from it (just as well considering how much of it I read when I moderate comments on the ESET blog), rather than because the world is full of bloggers waiting for me to tell them how to recognize it, even if it isn’t apparently posted by someone called nike soccer shoes or where to buy a laptop or even my personal favourite of the moment, rolling in the deep adele. (Well, there went my favourite heuristic.)

Still, I liked the cheek of this one:

“Throughout the great scheme of things you’ll get a B- for effort. Where you actually confused me personally was first on your particulars. As people say, the devil is in the details… And it couldn’t be more correct here. Having said that, let me inform you what did deliver the results. Your authoring is pretty powerful which is most likely the reason why I am taking the effort in order to comment. I do not make it a regular habit of doing that. 2nd, even though I can easily see a leaps in reason you make, I am not sure of just how you appear to connect the points which inturn produce the final result. For the moment I shall yield to your point but trust in the foreseeable future you actually link the facts better.”

So much so that I did a quick Google to see how common this particular approach is, and sure enough I found a whole bunch of very similar posts – by similar, I mean the same core text with minor changes such as “the great pattern of things”. Apparently, I’m not the only blogger who tends to assume that if a comment is enthusiastic, it’s probably spam.

Thank you for your constructive criticism, Mr feather extensions online: I like your style. But my absolute favourite at the moment is Fritz, who commented dispiritedly that he is “always a big fan of linking to bloggers that I love but don’t get a lot of link love from”: too bad URLs in comments are stripped automatically, or I might have allowed that one through just to put a smile on your face.

David Harley

And, once again, Shaw has cut off my outbound email.  For no reason that I can determine.  This time tech support aren’t even answering messages.

Maybe I should make the point that if I can’t answer my email, I have more time to blog about their lousy service …

Once again, in a month and a half, Shaw has disabled my outbound email.

For no particular reason.

Oh, sure, the error code says 554, rejected due to poor reputation.  So, like before, I do a lookup.  (For those interested in the stability of DHCP, my IP address is still the same, a month an a half later.  Even after being away for two conferences, and a short vacation.)  So, once more, I look up http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/detailip?search_string=70.79.166.169

This time there is even less information.  Google groups, SpamCop, dnsbl.njabl.org, bl.spamcop.net, cbl.abuseat.org, sbl.spamhaus.org, and pbl.spamhaus.org all say I’m clean.  (dnsbl.sorbs.net refuses to say anything, oddly.)

RFC-Ignorant.Org does say, again, that Shaw itself is questionable.  So, does that mean all Shaw clients are silent tonight?  How big of a CIDR does this affect?  (And why?)  How come I’m the guy who gets picked on?

Once again, Shaw’s “help” “Support” line is of no use.  This time around “Jason” tells me I just have to be patient: the spam guys are looking into something.  He won’t venture any guesses as to what the something is.

By now people are starting to hear that RSA has been hit with an attack.  Reports are vague at best, and we have very little idea how this may affect RSA customers and security in general.  But I’d like to opine about a few points.

First, we, in the profession of information security, are still not taking malware seriously enough.  Oh, sure, most people are running antivirus software.  But we don’t really study and understand the topic.  Malware gets extremely short shrift in any general security textbook.  Sometimes it isn’t mentioned at all.  Sometimes the descriptions are still based on those long-ago days when boot-sector infectors ruled the earth.  (Interesting to see that they are coming back again, in the form of Autorun and Autoplay, but that’s simply another aspect of Slade’s Law of Computer History.)  Malware has gradually grown from an almost academic issue to a pervasive presence in the computing environment.  It’s the boiling frog situation: the rise in threat has been gradual enough that we haven’t noticed it.

Second, we aren’t taking security awareness seriously enough.  These types of attacks rely primarily on social engineering and malware.  Security awareness works marvelously well as a protection against both.  RSA is a security corporation: they’ve got all kinds of smart people who know about security.  But they’ve also got lots of admin and marketing people who haven’t been given basic training in the security front lines.  For a number of years I have been promoting the idea that corporations should be providing security awareness training.  Not just to their employees, but to the general public.  For free.  I propose that this is not just a gesture of goodwill or advertising for the companies, but that it actually helps to improve their overall security.  In the modern computing (and interconnected communications) environment, making sure somebody else knows more about security means that there is less chance that you are going to be hit.

(Third, I really hate that “APT” term.  “Advanced Persistent Threat” is pretty meaningless, and actually hides what is going on.  Yes, I know that it is embarrassing to have to admit that you have been tricked by social engineering [which is, itself, only a fancy word for "lying"] and tricked badly enough that somebody actually got you to run a virus or trojan on yourself.  It’s so last millennium.  But it’s the truth, and dressing it up in a stylish new term doesn’t make it any less so.)

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that there’s a lot of malware/SEO/scamming whenever a major disaster occurs. A few days ago I started to put together a list of commentary (some of it my own) and resources relating to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, in anticipation of that sort of activity.

Originally, I was using several of my usual blog venues, but decided eventually to focus on one site. As ESET had no monopoly on useful information, I wanted to use a vendor-agnostic site. Actually, I could have used this one, but for better or worse, I decided to use the AVIEN blog, since I’ve pretty much taken over the care and feeding of that organization. The blog in question is Japan Disaster: Commentary & Resources.

It’s certainly not all-inclusive, but it’s the largest resource of its type that I’m aware of. Eventually, it will be organized more so as to focus again on the stuff that’s directly related to security, but right now, given the impact of the crisis, I’m posting pretty much anything that strikes me as useful, even if its relevance to security is a bit tenuous.

I’m afraid I’m going to post this pointer one or two other places: apologies if you trip over it more often than you really want to!

David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
AVIEN COO
ESET Senior Research Fellow

I seem to be back on the air.

A few observations over this whole affair:

(Sorry, I’ve not had time to put these in particular order, and some of the point may duplicate or relate …)

1) I still have absolutely no idea why Shaw cut me off.  They keep blaming Spamhaus, but the only links they offer me as evidence clearly show that there is no “bad reputation” in the specific IP address that I am currently using, only a policy listing showing one of Shaw’s address ranges.

2) I got absolutely no warning from Shaw, and no notice after the fact.

3) Shaw’s spam filtering is for the birds.  Today I got two messages flagged as spam, for no clear reason I could see.  They were from a publisher, asking how to send me a book for review.  The only possible reason I could see was that the publisher copied three of my email addresses on the same message.  A lot of people do that, but it usually doesn’t trip the spam filter.  Today it did.  (Someone else with Shaw “service” tried to send out an announcement to a group.  Since he didn’t have a mailing list server, he just sent out a bunch of messages.  Apparently that got *his* account flagged as spamming.)  I also got the usually round of messages from security mailing lists tagged as spam: Shaw sure has something against security.  And at least one 419 scam got through unflagged today, despite being like just about every other 419 in the world.  (Oddly, during this period I’ve noted a slight uptick in 419s and phishing in general.)

4) Through this episode I had contact with Shaw via email, phone, “live chat,” and Twitter.  I follow ShawInfo and Shawhelp on Twitter.  On Twitter, I was told to send them a direct message (DM).  I had, in fact, tried to do that, but Shaw doesn’t accept direct messages by default.  (Since I pointed that out to them, they now, apparently accept them from me.)  They sent me public messages on Twitter, and I replied in kind.  Through the Twitter account they also informed me that error 554 is “poor reputation” and is caused by sending too many emails.  They didn’t say how many is too many.  (Testing by someone else indicated something on the order of 50-100 per hour, and I’ve never done anything near that scale.)

5) The “live chat” function installs some software on your (the client) machine.  At least two of the pieces of software failed the digital signature verification …

6) The “information” I got from Shaw was limited.  The first (phone) support call directed me to http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/detailip?search_string=70.79.166.169  If you read the page, the information is almost entirely about the “network” with only a few (and not informative) pieces about the IP address itself.  (I did, separately, confirm that this was my IP address.)  The bulk of the page is a report on addresses that aren’t even in the same range as I am.  About halfway down the right hand side of the page is “DNS-based blocklists.”  If you click the “[Show/Hide all]” link you’ll notice that four out of five think I’m OK.  If you click on the remaining one, you go to http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=70.79.166.169  At the moment, it shows that I’m completely OK.  At the time I was dealing with Shaw, it showed that it’s not in the SpamHaus Block List (SBL) or the XBL.  It was in the PBL (Policy Block List), but only as a range known to be allowed to do open sending.  In other words, there is nothing wrong with my IP address: Shaw is in the poop for allowing (other) people to send spam.

7) The second (live chat) support call sent me to http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a70.79.166.169+  Again, this page showed a single negative entry, and a whole page of positive reports.  The single negative entry, if pursued, went to the same Spamhaus report as detailed above.

At the time, both initial pages, if followed through in terms of details, led to http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL164253 giving, as the reason, that “This IP range has been identified by Spamhaus as not meeting our policy for IPs permitted to deliver unauthenticated ‘direct-to-mx’ email to PBL users.”  Again, Shaw’s problem, not mine.  However, that page has a link to allow you to try and have an address removed.  However, it says that the “Removal Procedure” is only to be used “If you are not using normal email software but instead are running a mail server and you are the owner of a Static IP address in the range 70.79.164.0/22 and you have a legitimate reason for operating a mail server on this IP, you can automatically remove (suppress) your static IP address from the PBL database.”  Nevertheless, I did explore the link on that page, which led to http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/removal/  Again, there you are told “You should only remove an IP address from the PBL if (A) the IP address is Static and has proper Reverse DNS assigned to your mail server, and (B) if you have a specific technical reason for needing to run a ‘direct-to-MX’ email service, such as a mail server appliance, off the Static IP address. In all other cases you should NOT remove an IP address from the PBL.”  This did not refer to my situation.  Unfortunately, THESE TWO PAGES ARE INCORRECT.  If you do proceed beyond that page, you get to http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/removal/form  This page does allow you to submit a removal request for a dynamic IP address, and, in fact, defaults to dynamic in the form.  It was only on the last part of the second call, when the Shaw tech gave me this specific address, that I found this out.  For this I really have to blame Spamhaus.

9) In trying to determine if, by some weird mischance, my computer had become infected, I used two AV scanners, one spyware scanner, and two rootkit scanners.  (All results negative, although the Sophos rootkit scanner could have been a bit clearer about what it had “found.”)  Of course, I’ve been in the field for over two decades.  How would the average user (or even a security professional in a non-malware field) even know that there are different types of scanners?  (Let alone the non-signature based tools.)

Well, multiple scanners say I have no malware, no spyware, and no rootkits.

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a70.79.166.169+ says I’m clean except for Spamhaus.

Spamhaus shows that http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=70.79.166.169 I’m clean and it’s Shaw that’s dirty.

Shaw’s support is as inane as ever:

GoToAssist (11:43:33):
Your representative has arrived.

Stephen – 6685 (11:43:37):
Thank you for choosing Shaw Internet Chat Support, my name is Steve.  I will be happy to help you today.Before continuing, would you please confirm your home telephone number and address so that I can bring up your account information?

[If you don't mind, I've elided this, but it's the only change I've made - rms]

Stephen – 6685 (11:44:57):
Thank you, one moment please
Stephen – 6685 (11:48:07):
from what we see on the notes, it looks like your email is being blocked to due a poor reputation which means its being blocked by spam protection companies,  im just looking into this a little further for you.

Rob Slade (11:49:16):
Do you have any idea of what that means?  When I talked to “Rowell” yesteerday, he did not know anything about anti-spam technology, and just kept handing me bafflegab.  If you do not have any knowledge in thsi area, please hand me to someone who does.
Rob Slade (11:49:46):
I should let you know that I *do* know what I’m talking about: look up “Robert Slade” on Wikipedia.

Stephen – 6685 (11:49:48):
your being blocked by spamhaus
Stephen – 6685 (11:50:02):

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a70.79.166.169+

Rob Slade (11:50:18):
I’ve written two books on viruses and malware, the first book on software forensics, and a dictionary of information security.
Rob Slade (11:50:38):
I do know what spam is, and I am well aware of antipsam technology.
Rob Slade (11:51:08):
Per looking at senderbase yesterday, my specific IP address has nothing on it.  Just Shaw’s domain range.

Stephen – 6685 (11:52:03):
you would need to go here   http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup.lasso   type in your ip address to lookup, then  click the document it shows under the listed in red, and follow the steps to get it removed from spamhaus

Rob Slade (11:52:29):

http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=70.79.166.169

Rob Slade (11:53:04):
See that it is only listed in the PBL, and if you look up the detail on that you will see that it is only the Shaw /22 range, and not my address.
Rob Slade (11:53:49):
Going back to your original list, you will see that it is *only* listed on Spamhaus (and therefore only on the PBL), and that *all* the other sites give me a clean bill of health.
Rob Slade (11:54:19):
In addition, why did I get absolutely no warning or notice from Shaw, just had my ability to send cut off without warning?

Stephen – 6685 (11:54:27):
its not blocked by us
Stephen – 6685 (11:54:31):
thats why we couldnt give warning
Stephen – 6685 (11:54:37):
its blocked by spamhaus

Rob Slade (11:54:49):
It is your SMTP server that refuses the connectionh.
Rob Slade (11:55:00):
You can’t blame Spamhaus.

Stephen – 6685 (11:55:14):
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a70.79.166.169+   please review this,  it will show you based on a search of your ip address, its listed by spamhaus-zen….

Rob Slade (11:55:52):
That is the same list as before.

Stephen – 6685 (11:56:19):
yes it is

Rob Slade (11:56:36):
As I told you, it gives me a clean bill of health, except for Spamhaus, and Spamhaus only lists the Shaw /22 range in the PBL, not my IP address specifically.

Stephen – 6685 (11:56:37):
if you look at the top.. spamhaus-zen  to the right of that it shows as listed  which means its blocked by them
Stephen – 6685 (11:57:00):
its still being listed by them, otherwise it would come up saying OK  next to spamhaus
Stephen – 6685 (11:57:16):
if you login to webmail  and try sending an email out from there, it will work because its not associated with your computer
Stephen – 6685 (11:57:30):
its not working on your computer because your ip  address is blocked by spamhaus

Rob Slade (11:57:44):
Yes, and if you look at the detail, you will see that I am *not* lsited in the SBL, *not* listed in the CBL, and *only* listed in the PBL, and if you look at the detail for *that* you will see that it is *Shaw* that violates, not me.
Rob Slade (11:58:37):
Here. chew on these: http://is.gd/VbjOIh http://is.gd/ogefIX

Stephen – 6685 (11:59:31):
im not sure what i am suppose to be seeing in those links..   Error establishing a database connection
Stephen – 6685 (12:00:07):
http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/query/PBL164253  from there, you will need to follow the steps from clicking on remove an ip from pbl

Rob Slade (12:01:20):
In the meantime, I will be writing up more blog posts on how Shaw has inconsitent spam filtering, does not say what kind of spam filtering it does do, has a weird relationship with the blacklisting outfits.
Rob Slade (12:02:09):
Obviously you have not read the page you sent me.  This is the procedure only if you are running an email server (MTA) yourself.  I don’t.  You guys do.

Stephen – 6685 (12:05:15):
yes, from the report, its showing that its being blocked due to not using smpt authentication, that gets addressed from our side, where we communicate with spamhaus to get that resolved, however also by having you follow the link from the remove my ip address can usaully help get it resolved quicker.
Stephen – 6685 (12:06:12):
it is blocked by spamhaus, not us, which is something that will get looked into, if it was just being blocked by us, we could easily resolve it for you, however because its being blocked by a 3rd party, it will take some time, in the meantime you can use webmail to send and receive emails

Rob Slade (12:06:19):
How so?  I don’t run an SMTP server, so I can’t give them full info in filling out that form.
Rob Slade (12:07:06):
Besides, it’s not a static address.
Rob Slade (12:07:45):
Obviously you do not know what you are talkign about.  Are you going to put me through to someone who does?

Stephen – 6685 (12:08:08):
yes i do know what i am talking about Rob

Rob Slade (12:08:45):
Then how come you are asking em to fill out a form when the instructions specifically state not to do it unless this is a static IP address and I am running my own mail server?
Rob Slade (12:09:36):
http://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/removal/ “You should only remove an IP address from the PBL if (A) the IP address is Static and has proper Reverse DNS assigned to your mail server”

Stephen – 6685 (12:09:37):
i am just looking to see what more we can do on this right now, i will be a couple minutes.

As noted, Shaw is not very helpful with spam.  I’ve been getting spam from Marlin Travel, and from a band of people selling recuriting seminars, for a number of years.  I have been reporting this spam (to Shaw, and their supposedly automated spam filters) on at least a weekly basis for years.  Occasionally they deign to mark one of the messages as spam, but not on anything like a consistent basis.

Spam filtering is not transparent.  You can turn it on, or off.  You can have the spam go to the bit bucket, or get flagged.  There are no other options, and you have no information on how it works (or doesn’t).  (Heck, Vancouver Community Net [formerly Free-Net] does better than that.)

On my non-support call with Shaw, the agent did correctly identify the IP address I am (currently) using.  I have no idea when last it was switched.  Looking it up on senderbase is not supremely informative: there doesn’t seem to be any information on the address itself, other than the fact that it’s not in the SpamHaus Block List (SBL) or the XBL.  It is in the PBL (Policy Block List), but only as a range known to be allowed to do open sending.  In other words, there is nothing wrong with my IP address: Shaw is in the poop for allowing (other) people to send spam.

Meantime I have confirmed that, as I already knew, there is nothing malware or spam related on my machine.  Nothing that MSE detects.  Nothing that Vipre detects.  Nothing that Spybot detects.  At the moment I’m running the Sophos rootkit detector, and F-Secure’s Blacklight.  They haven’t found anything either.  I am, of course, morally certain that Shaw was lying to me about the possibility, but, unlike them, I’m not arrogant enough not to check.  I was right: they are idiots.  And, with their non-support, have cost me a lot of valuable time checking a clean machine.  (Plus not providing the Internet service I’m paying for.)