MAAWG unveils spam and botnet battling policies

Working group of ISPs and net operators issue traffic calming guidelines.

Global collaboration body the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has ratified a set of guidelines developed by groups of members from around the world, and approved at a recent group meeting, aimed at combating botnets and spam at an ISP level.

The guidelines focus on handling of email sent from hosts with dynamic IP addresses, a common bot behaviour, and include measures for ISP to efficiently share data on what IP address ranges are used for these hosts. A second set of best practices deal with problems surrounding email forwarding, aiming to help ISPs and spam filters accurately judge the levels of mail coming from specific domains without data being confused by forwarding.

An overview of the documents and their development process is on the MAAWG site here. Some analysis is at PCWorld here.

30 June 2008

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