[cobalt-users] OT: Unsolicited Commercial Email IP's

[Mike Smith <cobaltdude2002@xxxxxxxxx>]

Howdy gang,

Just curious about UCE origins for everyone else...

For the past 6 weeks, we have compiled a list of origins of UCE and
will hopefully place this list online shortly. During the compilation,
we noticed a trend - nearly 70% of UCE came to us from Verizon IP's. In
most cases, the originating IP (or IP's in some cases) appeared to be
spoofed as they were traced to IANA IP's.

Last year, we did the same thing and the trend for UCE origination was
mainly APNIC IP's. We blocked the majority of those and UCE subsided
greatly. We have now begun blocking Verizon - literally nearly IP we
can obtain. Hopefully, the results will be the same as last year in
that UCE will greatly subside.

I'm curious as to if anyone else has been tracking UCE and if so, are
your results posted anywhere? I'd like to perform a comparison to our
results.

BTW, I did contact Verizon about this issue. Their first response was
the typical canned auto-response, but the second response was from a
real person. It wasn't much more informative than the canned response.

What I have concluded - and correct me if I am mistaken - is that in
this day and age of cable modems and dsl, ISP's are *not* instructing
their clients in matters of internet security. I'm certain that many
users have trojans or back doors on their machines and are not aware of
this - and their machine become, if nothing else, spam generators, or
at least offer the opportunity for the spam-meisters to bounce off of
these machines. If this is true, then doesn't the responsibility of
informing and instructing cable modem and dsl users fall onto the ISP's
who provide such services? If so - does anyone feel that these ISP's
are lacking in their responsibilities? Or does it fall on the user? (As
in, one cannot blame GM or Ford for an accident if one cannot drive a
vehicle).

Comments are greatly welcomed....


Mike Smith



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