[ISN] Anti-spam sites weather DDoS assault

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2007 - 00:03:43 PDT


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/11/anti-spam_ddos/

By John Leyden
11th June 2007 

Prominent anti-spam services came under a sustained denial of service 
attack late last week. The assault targeted Spamhaus, Spam URI Realtime 
Blocklists (SURBL), and Realtime URI Blacklist (URIBL).

The URIBL (which, like SURBL - filters junk mail based on spam sites 
mentioned in their message bodies) website was rendered temporarily 
available by the assault between Wednesday and Friday. It used DDoS 
mitigation technology from Prolexic to restore services.

Both Spamhaus and SURBL managed to keep their sites up and running 
during the onslaught. The Rules Emporium, which hosts additional rules 
for SpamAssassin, was unavailable on Friday, but it's unclear whether 
this was a direct result of the assault on fellow spam-busting sites.

Last week's attacks were likely launched from a network of compromised 
(zombie) PCs and were of the same type as those that knocked out 
spam-busting outfit Blue Security last year, according to the Internet 
Storm Centre (ISC).

"The attacks seem to be similar to those carried out against 
BlueSecurity last year, with the Storm malware. Storm is a botnet that 
can do basically anything..." security watchers at the ISC note [1].

On the plus side, the fact that spammers have taken to launching denial 
of service attacks might be a sign of desperation, it adds. ®

[1] http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=2940



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