Spammers Damaging DNS
from the wonderful dept
As if spam wasn’t problematic enough, it’s now causing problems for DNS servers. It seems that some spammers are sending out spam from a domain that doesn’t exist. They wait some period of time, and then register the non-existent domain, scoop up a few sales, and then abandon it. They hope this makes it harder to track them down. Of course, it also makes it harder to track down their DNS entry… and that’s apparently causing extra stress on DNS servers who are often overwhelmed with requests for entries on domains that simply don’t exist.
Comments on “Spammers Damaging DNS”
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lol, does this mean that all this time DNS was never caching negatives?
if so we should thank these people because without cached negatives someone that had destruction instead of profit on their minds could really kill the net. no?
How Does This Tactic Work?
I’m not sure I understand how this works. If the spammer sends E-mail with a domain that doesn’t work in the header, any good backcheck system will catch it. If the domain in the body isn’t registered, they’ll potentially lose sales when suckers, er, customers get 404 errors.
One thing I’ve noticed in spam lately is the proliferation of URLs with the .info top-level domain. I suspect one reason for this is registrars that were giving free .info domains for one year. This seems to be ideal for spammers, and probably allows the .info registry to claim that they’re the fastest growing domain.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, first thing, let’s kill all the spammers.
kinda works backwards too
don’t forget when spamcop blacklists a whole ip just because of a single spammer on a shared server, instead of just blacklisting the domain name….