Provocateur Comes Into View After Cyberattack

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/after-cyberattack-sven-olaf-kamphuis-is-at-heart-of-investigation.html?pagewanted=all

by uladzislau • 13 years ago

32 19 13 years ago

nytimes.com

dmix• 13 years ago

Non-mobile version with graphics:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/business/global/after-cybe...

zimbatm2• 13 years ago

> Spamhaus acted, he wrote, “without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers ..."

That's the issue. It sucks to wake up one day and find out that your mail server has been blacklisted. All your customers are now affected and it's too late. If they added whole IP blocks to the list it might be even more annoying.

That said it's not like Spamhaus is charging you to be removed from their list, it just takes a little bit of time once you cleanup. http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/Spamhaus%20SBL#137

nsns• 13 years ago

Very good overview of Spamhous' practices in Ars today (http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/when-spammers-go-to-...).

kevingadd2• 13 years ago

Some of the behaviors described by Ars definitely sound shady to me; big ISP doesn't agree with you on the definition of illegal behavior, or in fact insists that local laws obligate them to protect their customers, so you blacklist the entire ISP? Complete nonsense. Feels to me like Spamhaus' operators understand that they now have a big hammer to swing (due to their popularity) so they use it freely to punish anyone they consider to be an 'evildoer', regardless of the collateral damage. If I were a customer of that ISP, I wouldn't be blaming the ISP, I'd be blaming Spamhaus.

It also makes me wonder: How legit are the people running Spamhaus? If someone decides he wants to make a quick buck, is it possible for him to just arbitrarily add a site's IP ranges to the routing blacklist, and then send the site's operators a cash demand, like DDOS operators sometimes do?

gav• 13 years ago

I've never had a problem with Spamhaus, it's straightforward enough to get removed from the list if needed. It's way worse dealing with providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo who arbitrarily block mail.

I'd argue that 99% of businesses are better served letting a third-party deal with marketing and transactional emails and only use outgoing SMTP for their own emails.

corresation• 13 years ago

That isn't the issue however as it is a voluntary list: they don't actually block anything, but those who trust their process block based upon that list. The difference is small but enormous, and if they were sloppy with their list people wouldn't use it.

blatherard• 13 years ago

You left off three words from the quote in the NYTimes article. "...and Jew lies" This is quite the omission.

The full quote is 'Spamhaus acted, he wrote, “without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.” When I read that, I get a very different picture than simply one of an aggrieved businessman working in a grey area.

zimbatm2• 13 years ago

Exactly my aim. The angle I wanted to take was just spam-haus related and didn't want to introduce Semitic argumentation. I'm not trying to defend Mr. Kamphuis, just taking a different angle since the press seem to be unilateral.

onemorepassword2• 13 years ago

I've heard the same argument time and time again when I was still working for an ISP and involved in spam-fighting back in the 90's.

Reality is, you have to totally ignore complaint after complaint about spam coming from your network before you end up on any blacklist.

Most common form of negligence often came from some management decision to let role accounts like abuse@ get handled by non-technical communication or support people with zero authority to escalate the problem. If that still happens in 2013, fuck them.

Bottom line is that only willful negligence or deliberate support to spammers can get you blacklisted. If you are in no hurry to remove spammers, don't expect Spamhaus e.a. to be in any hurry to un-blacklist you.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

The problem is that the blacklists have no problem with harming the customers of the network, who have done nothing wrong.

nlh• 13 years ago

Note to those of you who have, plan to, or might possibly have any sort of agenda about anything in your lives:

Raw, brutish racism/culturalism doesn't help your message. At all.

I read a line like this:

"Spamhaus acted, he wrote, 'without any court verdict, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.'"

And regardless of whether he's right or not about Spamhaus, his credibility in my eyes has gone straight to absolute zero.

nonamegiven• 13 years ago

It's amazing to me that anyone speaking that point of view has any credibility at all. With anyone.

socillion• 13 years ago

> And regardless of whether he's right or not about Spamhaus, his credibility in my eyes has gone straight to absolute zero.

Wasn't that entirely the point of the article, to attack his character?

If he was some lawyer stiff, people wouldn't be reading this - they enjoy reading content-light articles that spin caricatures of charismatic individuals. Assange all over again!

It's hardly debatable whether he would have gotten media exposure like this if he didn't behave in such a manner; I think that overall this exposure will help his cause, not hurt it. Even if a majority discard STOPhaus claims immediately on the basis that their spokesman appears to be a nut, the minority dwarfs anything they would have reached otherwise.

tl;dr you only saw this message because it was raw, brutish, and insensitive.

onemorepassword2• 13 years ago

In this particular case, it has less to do with racism/antisemitism and more with conspiracy paranoia.

codezero• 13 years ago

“Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project ‘spamhaus.org,’ which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the Internet,”

Nobody is forced to use Spamhaus, right? They aren't dictating what is on the Internet, they are offering a list to filter what they think is junk and people can choose to use that or not.

Also, I am curious, did he ever care about Spamhaus before he started to get included in their blacklists?

contingencies• 13 years ago

The real problem with spam is that there is no presently widespread, realistic alternative to email in the field of P2P store and forward communications infrastructure that is less centralized / vulnerable to state surveillance and other common attacks.

Provocateur Comes Into View After Cyberattack

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