Mrs Mubarak's IP addresses used by spammers
Spammers finding new ways to obtain non-blacklisted addresses.
While not necessarily related to the current unrest in Egypt - which, among other things, led to the cutting off of
most the country from the Internet - over 5,000 IP addresses belonging to the wife of
the country's president have been hijacked by spammers.
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The range of addresses was assigned to the Suzanne Mubarak Science Exploration Center several years ago and may well
have been dormant for some time. However, spammers managed to hijack the range and have been using it to send
spam pushing a number of dodgy web businesses.
IP blacklisting has been a major anti-spam tool for some years and thus for a spam
campaign to be successful it helps a great deal if the emails are sent from addresses that have not
(yet) been blacklisted. Stealing dormant IP ranges is a method that is becoming more popular among spammers; they
manage to gain control of the addresses by registering expired domains or sending forged letters to the regional
Internet registry.
With IPv4 addresses becoming scarcer, a secondary market of dormant but assigned IPv4 addresses is likely to arise
and one can be certain that those with less honest intentions will find ways to benefit from this market too.
Registries ought to be aware of this issue and those in the anti-spam business - particularly those running IP
blacklists - should ensure they respond swiftly to the abuse of hijacked IP addresses.
More at the blog of security journalist Brian Krebs
here,
with information on Mrs Mubarak's IP range at The Spamhaus Project
here.
Tags:
blacklist, egypt, ip address, registry, spam.
Posted on 01 February 2011 by Virus Bulletin.
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