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Spam War Takes Out Blog Services

Posted by Zonk on Thu May 04, 2006 10:06 AM
from the lj-writers-use-ddos'd-icon dept.
Spam Security The Internet
munchola writes "Following on from the story about spammers attacking Blue Security's anti-spam system, CBR is reporting that Six Apart, which runs the popular LiveJournal and TypePad blogging services, has become a collateral victim. Six Apart told its millions of bloggers it had experienced 'intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com', before resolving the issue in the early hours of Wednesday. '[The spammers are] trying to rip apart the internet just to make our community stop fighting back against spam,' Blue Security's chief executive Eran Reshef said, adding that he knows who's behind the attack."
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Your Rights Online: Details of the LiveJournal Account Hacks 246 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has written about the recent spate of hijackings at Six Apart's popular LiveJournal service. Hundreds of journals have now been taken over by a notorious group called 'Bantown' using a series of complicated cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. Krebs details the recent security changes made by LiveJournal in response to the takeovers." From the article: "It is unclear whether LiveJournal has managed to close the security holes that the hackers claim to have used. The company says it has, but the hackers insist there are still at least 16 other similar JavaScript flaws on the LiveJournal site that could be used conduct the same attack. [Bantown] group members said they plan to turn their attention to looking for similar flaws at another large social-networking site. "
[+] BlueSecurity Database Compromised? 375 comments
EElyn writes "Numerous users of Blue Security's anti-spam system now report of a new form of aggressive spam. An unknown group of spammers claim to have derived a way to extract the member email addresses of Blue Security group's anti-spam system, called Blue Frog. Blue Frog, a small tool which once installed on the user's computer, enables Blue Security to systematically flood a known spammer's website with opt-out messages; much to the headache of the spammer. Tens of thousands of users have already signed up, so can it really be true that spammers now possess this database? Or is this yet another frail attempt by spammers to intimidate the user?" Another reader sent the text of the letter; read more to see.
Offsite: Massive DoS Attack Knocks TypePad, LiveJournal Blogs Offline
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  • Is Blue Security going public with who's behind it?
    He should, so we can put on the pressure.
  • Fighting abuse with abuse is bad.

    Swamping a spammer is not a good idea, because he can either redirect the attacks to an innocent third party, or simply pointless because they use stolen ressources, like trojaned computers that host illegal sites.

    The best way to eradicate spammers would simply be to go after their clients.

    • Re:Fighting abuse with abuse is bad (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ciscoguy01 (635963) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:14AM (#15262607)
      The best way to eradicate spammers would simply be to go after their clients.

      That hasn't worked yet. If you have some idea how that could be accomplished and effective against spam and spammers, please feel free to elaborate.

      Blue security seems to be causing pain to spammers, enough to get a rise out of them at least. Aren't they actually reflecting the spam back to the source? I think that was their tactic.

      If they are effective, that's a net positive in the spam fight.
      • Blue security seems to be causing pain to spammers, enough to get a rise out of them at least. Aren't they actually reflecting the spam back to the source? I think that was their tactic.

        I'm not so sure - read the last paragraph of the article:

        Neither Reshef nor TypePad's Sippey were comfortable talking about the technical details of the attack. Sippey said he did not believe it used the potent "DNS amplification" technique that emerged earlier this year.

        It seems a little...vague.

        I'm thinking there's at le

        • Re:Fighting abuse with abuse is bad (Score:5, Interesting)

          by ciscoguy01 (635963) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:50AM (#15262948)
          Even if that's not the case here, it's certainly possible for someone malicious to subvert Blue Security's agent in such a manner.

          It seems blue security has been compromised by the spammers.
          I can't see why blue security should be blamed- except for their security problem.
          The problem is spam and spammers, and it is ludicrous to think otherwise.

          I have been working on the spam problem for >10 years.

          The problem is lax ISPs and network operators who don't pay attention to their mail. Who don't jump on the trojaned machines on their network that are causing >90% of the spam problem in the world.

          I have had the same trojaned machine sending me the same spam every 15 minutes, from a school district. It took me days to finally get a shitty response out of the network operators there to get that machine shut down until it could be cleaned. They didn't seem concerned at all, it was like I was "bothering them" to ask them to stop that machine from spamming.
          I bet it was sending 150,000 messages between the ones I received. Obviously a major problem. They couldn't care less.
          Now THEY should have been DOS'd.

          Ya know, several years ago I asked one of the principles of Akamai to get involved, to provide some of the bandwidth and hosting in a fault tolerant fashion, which they reportedly are in a unique position to provide on their monitored distributed network. Practically cannot be effectivedly DOS'd. They thought my proposal "interesting" but didn't want to get involved for the good of the internet, because they didn't want to attract attention from the bad guys.
          It wasn't 5 or 6 months before they were DOS'd and extorted.

          EVERYONE is involved now. We are all being extorted by the spammers. If you cross them they will attack you, even if you just ask them to please stop spamming you.

          The only possible answer is responsibility. Networks being responsible for what goes on over their network. Shut down spammers. Don't rent them servers. Don't sell them bandwidth. Jump on problems, even on weekends and holidays, and you have to do it FAST.

          Nothing is going to stop spam completely, we can only increase the cost to spammers, and increase the costs for networks to sell to spammers. Make it uneconomical to have spammers as customers.

          When the cheapest T-1 a spammer can find is $250,000 a month, spam will stop.
          • Actually it was pretty conclusively said in the last Slashdot article on this topic that Blue Security wasn't compromised, what happened is that some spammer (which apparently they know but aren't releasing? That doesn't make much sense...anyway) took their spam-list, ran it through Blue's list-cleaning program which removes all BS subscribers, and then ran a diff on the result in order to get a list of people who'd signed up for Blue Security.

            Then he/she/it sent the people on this resulting list a lot of t
    • isn't that counter to what you have in your signature?
    • All blue frog does is requesting to be opted out. One form send per spam received. No more, no less.

      4 of the 10 major spammers had already excluded the blue security list from their mass mailings, and their problem was solved. But this particular spammer, instead of complying, shut down Blue Security.

      Just because Blue Frog causes A SIDE EFFECT of disminishing the bandwidth of the spammer's website, is not Blue Security's fault. (It is our LEGAL RIGHT to request for opt-out, and to keep requesting it UNTIL IT IS FULFILLED).

      To say opting out is abuse, is nothing but legitimizing illegal (non CAN-SPAM complying) spam.
    • The best way to eradicate spammers would simply be to go after their clients.

      No, there's a much better way [mosnews.com].

      • Sorry to disagree with you...

        But killing people does not solve crime (which is my reason to be against the death penalty).

        To put it in other words, shutting down an abuser does not shut down the system that promotes such abuse. The only way to stop spam is to make it non-profitable for spammers. And this is done by cluttering their sales forms with opt out requests (which is what Blue Frog does).

        Of course, if SPAM had been declared illegal in the first place... we wouldn't have to deal with this mess.
        • "Of course, if SPAM had been declared illegal in the first place... we wouldn't have to deal with this mess."

          You don't honestly believe that do you?!?!

          Most spam (in the true sense of the word) IS ALREADY ILLEGAL in that it is fraud.

          Spam doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is profit to the ISP hosting spam sites as well as the email accounts of known spammers. Add to that the security exploited machines and it makes email unusable.

          To put it in the words of spamhaus.org:

          "Although all networks claim to be anti-
    • Actually, that's exactly what I understood Blue Frog to be doing--going to the Web sites offering the products advertised in the spam, then filling out the order forms with words to the effect of "stop spamming Blue Frog users."
    • Fighting abuse with abuse is bad.

      Agreed, it's bad. Also when someone kicks you or hits you or whatever, if you beat him up, that's really bad.

      But you know what? It works. And in the end of the way, that's all that matters.

    • Re:Fighting abuse with abuse is bad (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bezzeb (442597) on Thursday May 04 2006, @11:59AM (#15263558)
      Guys, I'm growing tired of the high moral argument that "it's not right to fight abuse with abuse" or "eye for an eye still leaves you blind".

      War and drama asside: I keep waiting for someone to make this point but I'm not seeing it yet.

      Spam is a solicitation to contact the advertised party in the hopes that you will give them money. Otherwise known as an advertisement. THEY CONTACT US. It's called the free market. In turn we all have the right to use the communication path they supply to request that they leave us alone.

      Is it illegal to contact some company you see on a billboard or in a TV commercial? What absurdity! What is this world coming to where everyone gets sucked into DDoS drama at every chance? Blue Froggers are just doing business within the realm of the law. No stretching the rules. No sensationalism.

      The only reason spammer servers crash is because they aren't prepared and are poorly designed. They have two options:
      1. Seriously upgrade their infrastructure to handle whatever degree of responses their advertisements generate & hire more staff to process the hits their ad generates.
      =or=
      2. Seriously decrease their advertisements to be in line with their capacity to manage their generated trafic.

      It's just economics and common sense. This DDoS talk is a waste of time - the Blue Frog client is much nicer to the spammers than they are to us. And this huge amount of anger directed at Blue Frog is proof that it bites into their freedom to be irresponsible.

      They can keep their pill pushing sites - I don't care if there are suckers out there dumb enough to give them money. I just want them to stop bothering ME. They will never get one red hot cent from me. They WILL get endless trouble from me as long as they continue to disrespect my privacy.

      All the best folks!
      B.

  • Blame fest (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:09AM (#15262557) Homepage Journal
    fta:
    The spammer also launched a conventional bandwidth-consumption DDoS attack against bluesecurity.com. It was around this time that the company opened its new blog, which meant TypePad got whacked.

    This blue security article has been running for a few days now and the site hasn't been responding any time I've tried recently.

    Isn't it just another DDOS blame fest when in reality its just the news spreading around the world and all the collective users of all the collective news sites are clicking the links to try to read the story?

    A total slashdotting/digging/farking and general newsing all at once.

    It was the same when word spread about google going down.
    "OMG have you heard, google is dead?"
    *CLICK* "Yer, its not working here either" *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*
    *CLICK* "Hey, its loaded here." *CLICK* "Oh crap, its broken again now.."

    We are all guilty of assisting this DDOS attack. shame on us.

    It will ease up once something else comes and takes our attention away from it.
    • And you didn't even link to the site so we could see if it was back up yet.

    • Re:Blame fest (Score:5, Informative)

      by shark72 (702619) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:59AM (#15263061)

      " Isn't it just another DDOS blame fest when in reality its just the news spreading around the world and all the collective users of all the collective news sites are clicking the links to try to read the story?"

      No. Here's what happened:

      1. The spammer DDOSed bluesecurity.com. Quite well, in fact.
      2. After a few days, Blue Security managed to get a redirect going to a blog they put up on blogs.com, which is run by TypePad.
      3. The spammer then DDOSed TypePad.

      Believe me, TypePad gets Farked/Dugg/Slashdotted every day. They can handle the normal traffic spikes. This was deliberate, and it was well documented.

      "We are all guilty of assisting this DDOS attack. shame on us."

      A drop in the ocean. TypePad can absorb these sorts of things. Make no mistake: TypePad was taken down by a deliberate, coordinated DDOS attack.

  • Kill the spammers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pete6677 (681676) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:10AM (#15262571)
    I don't think spam will stop, or even slow down, until a spammer is seriously hurt or killed. Right now, they know there is no consequence to their actions. I'm not saying I personally advocate killing spammers, but it certainly wouldn't make me feel bad to hear about it being done. Spamming would be a lot riskier if there were an element of harm attached for the spammer.
    • I'm not sure I would like an internet where my online activities could result in physical bodily harm. I would never become a spammer, but still I don't like the idea. If you hate spam so much that you want to commit assault or murder you could just sign off, quit using email, etc.

      I know you were just kidding, but some people aren't :(
    • I dont think hurting spammers will do anything. In fact this would make spamming more lucritive as the price would go up because of the danger/fine factor. All of a sudden if its worth enough and its more dangerous more fishy/criminal organizations would get into it.

      I think going after companies and websites advertised in SPAM woudld do more damage. Get a 1 mil dollar fine and they wont be making the same mistake twice.

      Taking away the source of funds/content for spammers will at least minimize spam.

      • You're not SERIOUSLY saying that hitting the delete key, or any amount of bandwidth, is actually equal in value to a person's life, are you?

        I'm certainly not. I want to see them in PMITA prison and destitute, but not dead.

        However. According to a report from 2004 [spamfo.co.uk], spammers sent about 12.4 billion messages per day. If it takes one second per email to delete, then that consumes 393 person-years to remove from our collective inboxes. Assuming an average lifespan of 75, that means spammers use the entire

  • Techdirt [techdirt.com] has a different story on what caused the outages. The info they have came from here [digg.com].

  • Two birds with one stone? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 3.5 stripes (578410) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:12AM (#15262585)
    Taking out spammers and bloggers?

    I can't see any down side to this, honestly.

  • Self-hosting (Score:3, Informative)

    by AKAImBatman (238306) * <(akaimbatman) (at) (gmail.com)> on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:12AM (#15262588) Homepage Journal
    Ah, it's so nice to be self-hosted [intelligentblogger.com]. Back when I was on Blogger.com, myself and many other users who received links from Slashdot stories or news sites became the target of a spammer who's sole purpose was to screw up the service for everyone. He had a script that would bomb a blog with hundreds of racist messages, overloading the system in the process. (Sorry, blogger.com's software isn't that good.) I was forced to disable the comments, delete the entry, and recreate it. Thankfully, there were only a few anonymous comments on the current entry which were easy to recreate.

    While Blogger eventually added a captcha to solve the problem (after being non-responsive to support requests), it left a bad taste in my mouth. It was at that point that I decided to go self-hosted. I've never looked back. For the cost of a cheap hosting provider, you can setup a Wordpress installation that looks better, is more feature-rich, and automatically queues suspcious messages rather than allowing them to pass through. So while my site could be DDOSed if it was specifically targetted, it can't be overloaded with spam or used to take down other bloggers.
    • I am self hosted as well.... That doesn't mean the tools I am using is getting blasted with this same attack, whereas infact it is. I am finding b2evolution [b2evolution.net] is getting slammed with this same attack. *sigh* RFC 1087 needs to be given teeth.

      RFC 1087 Ethics and the Internet January 1989

      At great human and economic cost, resources drawn from the U.S.
      Government, industry and the academic community have been assembled
      in

  • "He's trying to rip apart the internet just to make our community stop fighting back against spam," Blue Security's chief executive Eran Reshef said of the spammer he believes launched the attack.

    LiveJournal and TypePad found themselves suffering the brunt of the attack when Blue, which says it has been targeted by a "top four" Russian spammer, redirected the front page of its website to a blog hosted at TypePad's data center.

    Reshef said Blue replaced the front page of its site with the TypePad blo

    • Re:Shifting attack (Score:5, Informative)

      by MrDoh1 (906953) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:30AM (#15262781) Journal
      They don't supply spammers with the addresses of their members. What they do is offer a tool that cleans our email addresses (which are contained in an encrypted database) out of their spam address databases. So all that was done is the spammer in question compared a pre-cleaned version with a post-cleaned version and any addresses that no longer appeared were obviously members of BlueSecurity.

      Also, the spam reports that are sent out are sent from a proxy type email address. My normal address wouldn't show up, but username@reports.bluesecurity.com is where it would come from.

      Personally, I see nothing wrong with sending 1 unsubscribe request per piece of spam I get. BlueSecurity has just automated this method so I don't have to take the time, and they also handle escalation to the proper authorities if the situation isn't resolved.

      If the spammer perceives getting 1 unsubscribe request per spam he sends a DDOS attack then I would think the best course of action would be not to send to those people. Heck, we are the ones who wouldn't buy anything from them anyway.

      Also, based on what I have read in the blog itself (when it was still accessible) it was a user in the comments that suggested redirecting the site and error pages to the blog so users would at least have some clue what was going on. It's likely they took the advice without contemplating the potential outcome.

      • Re:Shifting attack (Score:4, Insightful)

        by anagama (611277) <thepotter AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday May 04 2006, @11:57AM (#15263522) Homepage
        Does Bluesecurity have a linux or mac client yet? Spammer is an idiot. 1) he raises awareness of what bluesecurity does. 2) he makes it look like BS works -- why else would he waste resources he could be using to spam or extort people, it must be hurting him. Effectively, this is great for PR Bluesecurity -- how much would a worldwide advertising campaign have cost?

  • Everyone keep's knocking blue... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZSpade (812879) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:17AM (#15262641) Homepage
    But have they got any better suggestions. The federal government is a *Joke* about bringing any kind of justice down on this filth, and so the masses remained *outraged* and *victimized*. To me a (A computer tech) I see people's computers every day that have been turned into Zombies. Some so bad that they have to be reformated. They are bringing in their computers to me, and paying hard cash for me to fix it and prevent it from happening again. That's real money, real damages everyone is having to pay every day. I guess you could spin it in a positive light and say it's good for the tech industry, but not if people start becoming afraid to even get on the internet because of what might happen to their computer. This is theft, this is vandilism and the governements of the world are practically standing by and watching it happen.

    So, do you have any better suggestions, if not then I kindly ask you to ommit your views until you can add something to the cause.
    • So, do you have any better suggestions, if not then I kindly ask you to ommit your views until you can add something to the cause.

      OK. Here's one. Summary execution for spammers and their families. It would solve the problem more effectively than anything else we've got.

      You don't have any better suggestions? Then don't you dare criticize this one!

      Sorry for the Modest Proposal (I do not advocate killing people over spam!), but the point I'm trying to make is: it's entirely legitimate to criticize an idea
  • If a kneecap or two happens to get broken, well, so be it...
  • I've devised a method [slashdot.org] to keep opting out while Blue Security's down. I posted it on my journal.

    The next step is automating the process, perhaps making a new version of Blue Frog that doesn't rely on a centralized server. Do that, and we'll regain our mailboxes.
  • *Puts on asbesto suit*

    That most DDOS attacks right now are done using botnets. If we should blame someone (besides our mediocre congress), it's Microsoft for having such a weak security in their desktop OS. And for not updating pirated copies [slashdot.org], which are used as botnets too!

  • Breaking point (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stray1 (862245) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:47AM (#15262915)
    Speaking as one of the people who helped start the last bluesecurity article, I think we've all had enough time to reflect and debate on the 'fight fire with fire' technique that blusecurity has enacted. What this new DDOS attack has brought to the table is something a little different. Before the attack, Bluesecurity would send an equal amount of opt out requests as spam. THIS DDOS attack on bluesecurity, which is clearly illegal, is the breaking point. I'm not sure WHAT going to break, (of than someones ISP) but it has shed light on spammers intentions. Spam artists have always relied on the fact that their activities arent spefically illegal. With this attack they have really crossed the line- This event could be the event that got some sort of anti spam- legislation rolling, (or it might have the opposite effect). Something should come out of this though, if only to be remembered the 'bluesecurity incident'. Personally I was pretty pissed having some jackass hold my gmail account for ransom, especially since bluesec. was so ridiculously effective. FYI, despite the threats, I have recieved no greater amount of spam than when I was first threatened on monday (sunday). I dont think their database was compromised despite what joe spammer tells us.
  • Wordpress [wordpress.org] is an excellent open source blogging tool. Couple that with Bad behavior [ioerror.us] and Spam Karma 2 [unknowngenius.com] and you've got yourself a near impenetrable blog to spam in your comments. The new version of Wordpress has tools to migrate from some popular blogging systems, so.. go check it out.

  • Take them out (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The spammer is in Russia. Let's hire the mafia nd take him out. Blue security has 500,000 members. If we all put in $1.00 each, we should manage to hire someone to take the spammer out. He won't be a problem after that, and he won't send any more spam.
  • They need more people so that it becomes non-viable to attack the community.

    I've not heard of BlueSecurity before, but after those stories, I'm signing up with them. I urge anyone who wants to help fight against spam and vandalism on the Internet do the same.

    After all, when noone can take care of a problem for you, it's time to step up and solve it yourself.
  • He says he knows who's behind it. He would not give a name, but said it was a "top four" spammer, who speaks Russian.

    Stop being cute about this and just tell us who. Information in power, and you're only facilitating this person's ability to continue to hide until you unmask him/them.

  • SixApart should sue them (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Thursday May 04 2006, @10:54AM (#15262997) Homepage
    Need an analogy to understand why SixApart should sue? It'd be like a corrupt police unit grabbing a school bus full of kids to use as human shields in the middle of a gun battle with a gang while the cops try to fall back and call for backup.

  • Tucows services still recovering from DDoS (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jayfar (630313) on Thursday May 04 2006, @11:08AM (#15263132)
    "Reshef indicated that a few thousand domains managed by a top-five domain name registrar may have been impacted by the attack too, but an executive at the registrar told us that it had seen some upstream troubles but no direct attack."

    Ha! All of Tucows services, including the managed dns and email defense services were completely down most of yesterday. The managed DNS service is still impaired until the new IPs of ns1.mdnsservice.com and ns2.mdnsservice.com propagate (they just this morning changed the TTL to 1200 secs %-).

    status.tucows.com

    Managed DNS Service Degraded Performance - restore time is currently unknown Beginning at approximately noon Wednesday May 3rd the Tucows network was under a severe DDOS attack. To stop the attack, we have changed the IP addresses of the servers. If you are using IP addresses in order to connect to MDNS, you will have to update your records. Also, any nameserver with a long TTL should be updated in order to use the new info. Next Update Time:15:20 UTC, 04 May 2006",/i>

  • BlueSecurity on holiday? Unacceptable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Animats (122034) on Thursday May 04 2006, @11:43AM (#15263409) Homepage
    Six Apart mitigated the attack to the point where it was no longer causing major availability problems, but had been unable to contact Blue. The anti-spam firm is headquartered in Israel, where May 3 was a public holiday.

    This is a 24/7 business. A serious online service vendor can't have company holidays. Least of all in the security business.

  • awright ... fess up... (Score:3, Funny)

    by nblender (741424) on Thursday May 04 2006, @02:04PM (#15264715)
    I don't associate spammers with the sort of people who have brains. This means that the spammers are hiring brains (not that it takes much brainpower to write php but I digress)... The sort of brains they'd hire are probably slashdot geeks....

    So which of you scumbags is responsible for this.

    • I think SixApart is being far too generous in not laying the blame for this fully at the feet of Blue Security. Basically Blue Security decided that their web site couldn't stand the DDOS, so they pointed the URL for their company to their blog.com blog. Thus DDOS'ing all of SixApart.

      If I were SixApart, I'd sue the fuck out of Blue Security for deliberately DDOSing them.
          • Don't be fucking pedantic. It's an analogy, buy a clue.

            Redirecting a URL is not vandalism.

            • Re:Guilty of what? (Score:4, Funny)

              by HTTP Error 403 403.9 (628865) on Thursday May 04 2006, @01:08PM (#15264213)
              Don't be fucking pedantic. It's an analogy, buy a clue.

              Redirecting a URL is not vandalism.
              --
              Fast, Reliable webhosting for online communities [communityhosting.net]

              Is it okay for Blue to redirect the next DDOS to communityhosting.net? I hear it is fast and reliable.
              • Your analogy is also crap.

                The best I've got is running a business out of your home that does tit for tat retaliation on organized crime businesses. They rough up one of your boys you rough up one of theirs. They get upset so they burn your house to teh ground. You escape and leave a note on the burnt out ashes that you'll be staying at the Middlebury Hotel in case your clients need to get a hold of you. The mobsters see the note and procede to burn the hotel to the ground as well.

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