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Topic: Spam is being sent using email addresses @ my domain  (Read 4075 times)
« on: September 16, 2006, 01:22:33 PM »
IcedHybrid Offline
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Hello,

Recently someone has started sending tons of spam emails out using randomly generated email accounts @ my domain (icedhybrid.com).
I am being flooded with delivery failure messages on my catchall account.
It used to be a small amount, maybe 300 every day or so, now its ramped up to 1800.
As far as I can tell, this spammer is using multiple open-relay smtp servers to send the mail, anything from yahoo to random .de servers.
I am not familiar enough with smtp protocol to know how to prevent this from happening.
What can I do to stop this? I don't want my domain to end up being blacklisted or anything.
As a temporary fix I can put in forwarders to redirect the messages to :blackhole: but that only lasts until they randomize the From email again.

TIA

Joseph Thomas
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« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2006, 02:15:54 PM »
Alex Melen Offline
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The emails are "from" your domain? Like asfdasfdsad@icedhybrid.com ? In 99.9% of these cases this kind of stuff is done via a script you have installed on the account... do you have any forum scripts or other php/cgi scripts installed?
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« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2006, 10:51:31 PM »
IcedHybrid Offline
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Yes, the emails are listed as from an email address at my domain (randomhere@icedhybrid.com),
the email accounts don't exist, which is why I keep getting the failed to send messages on my catchall account.
I had DotProject and WebCalendar installed via fantastico, looks like they needed to be updated a few versions.
I removed them, as I no longer use them.
Other than that, I only have PHP scripts that I have written myself to generate my pages.
None of them send email.
Basically you are saying someone is using flaws in my installed scripts to send these?
I also cleared out the scripts in my cgi-bin as well.
I guess I will see if the emails continue.

-Joseph
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« Reply #3 on: September 17, 2006, 01:44:09 AM »
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Would you have the headers from the emails?

Also I wouldn't use :blackhole: use :fail: but for you there really is not big difference between the two.
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« Reply #4 on: September 17, 2006, 02:22:15 AM »
IcedHybrid Offline
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Seeing as how getting rid of those scripts didn't stop the emails, I do have some to give you.
I've saved a few of the emails I'm getting into a rar and uploaded it to my website.
http://www.icedhybrid.com/downloads/spam-icedhybrid.rar
They are each in .eml files, which are basically raw text output of each email.
Each email has already been turned into a failed to deliver email, so you will have to scroll down to get to the original email headers.

Hope these help in some way.

I have quite a few forwarders set up to :blackhole:, should I take the time to convert them all to :fail: or will that cause them to be redirected back as fail to deliver?
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« Reply #5 on: September 17, 2006, 04:50:51 PM »
Alex Melen Offline
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I am not sure if I understand it correctly.. but why not send everything that isn't an actual account to the :blackhole:?
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« Reply #6 on: September 18, 2006, 02:57:15 AM »
Bret Craven Offline
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There's nothing that you can really do about the person spoofing your address into the emails. They are all coming from different locations too so there's really nothing that we can do to have that aspect of it stopped. You could try to use SpamAssasin to take messages that have the failure to deliver message in the subject and automatically delete them so that you never see them.
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« Reply #7 on: September 18, 2006, 09:53:05 AM »
IcedHybrid Offline
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I was using the catchall regularly so that I could use a unique email, such as (walmart@icedhybrid.com) to register with sites (in this case, Walmart), and then I would recieve their email without adding a bunch of accounts. This worked nicely, if any one address started to get spammed, as my walmart account did, I could just forward it to :blackhole: and not worry about it ever again.

Seeing as how that is now close to impossible with the amount of bounce messages I am getting, I guess I have no choice but to stop using it and create an account for every email I've ever given out...

The only alternative I've found is to have a Sender Policy Framework set up in the DNS so users can verify the sender with the host. Do you guys have this already setup, or plan on setting something like this up so domain owners can publish SPF records in the near future? Or is this something that needs to be done at a higher level?
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« Reply #8 on: September 18, 2006, 09:56:25 AM »
Alex Melen Offline
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Yeh.. spam is becoming a bigger and bigger problem these days. What I personally do, is create seperate accounts (like walmart in your example), and just create a forward. For instance, walmart@t35.com will forward to my actual email address. Then I do all unrouted emails to :blackhole: ... Otherwise I would get thousands of emails to random t35 domains.. jack@t35, joe@t35 ... very annoying.
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« Reply #9 on: January 31, 2007, 02:01:35 PM »
_doctor Offline
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I have the same problem with my domain symbianexample.com
I constantly get "replies" (2-10 per day) from the mail servers about spam sent from random addresses @symbianexample.com

Alex could you, please, check the mail server logs to see if some emails are really send from t35 server? If they are, there might be some security hole in my scripts or at t35.

P.S.
Typical "reply" I get looks as follows:
------------------------
wuw@symbianexample.com   
   date      Jan 31, 2007 8:00 PM   
   subject      Notification d'état de la distribution   
   mailed-by      server1.t35.net   
 - Ces destinataires ont été traités par le serveur de messagerie :
mcconnell71@laposte.net; Échec; 5.1.1 (adresse de boîte aux lettres de destination incorrecte ou inexistante)




Final-Recipient: rfc822; mcconnell71@laposte.net
Action: Failed
Status: 5.1.1 (bad destination mailbox address)



      noname
2K Download
------------------------
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« Reply #10 on: January 31, 2007, 02:50:53 PM »
Alex Melen Offline
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There is no security problem... just another spam annoyance. I get dozens of emails each day from @ebay.com with phising and such. If ebay hasn't found a way to stop the email spoofing, I doubt we would really have a chance.
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« Reply #11 on: February 03, 2007, 10:06:44 AM »
_doctor Offline
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I also get a lot of similar spam from @ebay.com, @example.com, etc. However, I can hardly imagine a spammer that found my domain on the web and decided to mask behind @symbianexample.com Smiley

Anyway, Alex, isn't it simple to check the mail server logs and see if any @symbianexample.com mail has really been sent from T35?
I did not send a single email from this address for weeks or maybe even for months.
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« Reply #12 on: February 03, 2007, 06:58:32 PM »
Alex Melen Offline
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None of those emails are registered in our logs because they don't really go through our server.. they are "spoofing" your domain, which pretty much means they are using different mail server and spoofing them to use your domain. So it doesn't touch our server in any way that we can trace.
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