Re: SMTP Scans

From: Hoof Hearted <capbligh2001(at)hotmail.com>
Date: Fri Apr 25 2003 - 20:21:57 EDT

Wow! - OK it's safe to say there is some opinion on this. Many thanks to all those that have taken the time and trouble to comment.

Opinion seems to be divided 99/1 that the scans (as posted) are bad. Kurt was the only one to point out the POTENTIAL savings. Ergo, assuming all mail is bad unless proven otherwise.

Admittedly, this is a minor digression on the point, however, it has validity. The day after posting my initial comments my (personal) router went south big-style. No big deal, failover was an adsl and $200 & 24 hours later all was fixed (bugger - now I WILL keep a spare on site!), in the meantime, some connection sharing solved the immediate inconvenience... and provided me with a useful list of 'oops' IP's.

Less than 24 hrs of Net life (unprotected by a NAT) scared me witless. I went from being mildly aggravated by Kurt's comments to wholehearted agreement. The world DOES seem to be out to get me!

Anyway, back to my point - my ISP is scanning me (at least) twice daily for an open relay, not only that, they are also scanning our mx listed secondary too - implying some nslookup work at least. Admittedly, the scans are not difficult to block, but for me at least, that doesn't change the issue. Whether I'm an ADSL customer, a DSL customer or even a dial-up user, my relationship with and obligation to my ISP ends at my modem/router/whatever. To my mind, when they intrude past that they become hackers.

To the best of my knowledge, none of our hosted domains have ever been accused of spamming, moreover, our mailservers use numerous UBE lookups, Header, Body & AV scans. I might point out that our settings were sufficient to catch (and bar) the BT connections without 'human' intervention.

I must admit to ignorance as to the legal situation here. I'm aware BT operate AUP's - I'm intrigued to know the result if THEY abuse them.

Anyway - BT response so far - Dear Sir - what time zone are your logs? (... Hmmmm.)

>From: "Kurt Seifried" <bt@seifried.org>
>Reply-To: "Kurt Seifried" <bt@seifried.org>
>To: "Mally Mclane" <mally@ripe.net>,"Rob Shein"
><shoten@starpower.net>,"'Hoof Hearted'"
><capbligh2001@hotmail.com>,<incidents@securityfocus.com>, "Jimi Thompson"
><jimit@myrealbox.com>
>Subject: Re: SMTP Scans
>Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 12:43:20 -0700
>
> > >>For the last few months our ISP (BT) has apparently been scanning our

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Received on Mon Apr 28 13:00:39 2003