Cloaking Device Made for Spammers

tasty cloaking hosting package

[ukgimp]

[wired.com...]

One group in Poland is currently advertising "invisible bulletproof hosting" in online forums for spammers. For $1,500 per month, the group says it can protect a site from network sleuthing tools used by spam opponents, such as traceroute and whois.

[claus]

Yes! I knew it would surface at some point. This is major news for webmasters - not good news though.

If there's any truth to this, they're building a private internet routing infrastructure hosted on infected windows PCs. This does explain a few recent odd threads:

What is this in my logs? [webmasterworld.com]

Global (Organized?) Formmail Queries [webmasterworld.com]

Formmail exploit hunter(s) out again [webmasterworld.com]

Fake Dynamic IP changing continusly [webmasterworld.com]

Look out for all kinds of normal users on different IP's doing odd things. Sad thing is - the users probably don't know what their machines are doing, so you'll risk banning a real user just for having an infected machine.

/claus

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edit: was just editing this post when it moved from "Cloaking" to "Foo"... Foo? "Tracking and Logging" is the right place imho

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Added:
It does not need to be this one Polish group that's behind all this - i'd be very surprised if other groups out there do not also have trojan networks running.

[pendanticist]

I concur with you claus...on all points.

One thing I wanted to bring up, with respect to the validity of a statement within the article.

Tabul said: "Try to find the real IP," he said. "This host is in rackshack.net, the most antispam ISP."

Not being one to take things on face value, I did some digging...

rackshack group:news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com] seems to indicate that both rackshack.net and ev1 group:news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com] (parent/sister company) histories seem far from stellar.

Having said that - If such hosting services do indeed come online (if they are NOT now), then legitimate Webmasters do indeed have major problems ahead.

Sure, the Internet is maturing. But, where is it headed?

Have the dividing lines already been drawn?

Is that what it's going to come down to? The good guys vs. the bad guys?

Is the future of the Internet to be predicated on mis-informed computer users becoming unwilling accomplises [webmasterworld.com] led by bullies who've decided what the Internet is to be...and to whom? Scary.

Given the hypothetical, what other ramifiations could come about which are not related to UCE/SPAM?

In other words, where else on the Internet could this type of hosting service present problems besides seeming to assure a UCE/SPAM site remains active?

In closing, let me say "Thank You!" to ukgimp for posting this article.

Pendanticist.