Structure & Strangeness

 

: Spam Warrior :

: Lately (as in the past few months [Ed.: Summer 2001]), I've been receiving literally gobs
: of spam. It's not your ordinary spam (although I get a little of that
: too). These are spam/viruses, most notably the Hybris worm, on which
: there's some excellent information online.

: However, I'm attempting to fight back using what tools are available.
: The interactive portion of this piece is that I'm going to walk you
: through what I'm doing (i.e. you're going to do it too).

: Here's a list of the date, IP, carrier and country from which I've received
: a spam/virus over the course of a few days in July.

7.12 211.3.232.66 Japan Telecom Japan
7.12 200.203.141.82 Brazil Telecom Brazil
7.12 148.221.152.131 Telefonos de Mexico Mexico
7.12 217.227.30.7 Deutsche Telekom AG Germany
7.12 202.108.44.206 Chinanet-BJ of China Telecom China
7.13 212.23.253.116 Colt Telecom AG Switzerland
7.14 213.132.137.246 TVD Internet Belgium
7.15 202.96.154.20 Chinanet Guangdong Province of China Tel. China
7.15 213.6.250.93 MobilCom Cityline GmbH Germany
7.15 63.144.65.127 Qwest Communications USA
7.15 202.158.92.211 PT. Cyberindo Aditama Indonesia
7.15 164.77.129.11 ??? ???

: [Update] I'm also maintaining a more complete log of all IP spamming me to date.

: Alright, let's get to work!

: Getting started :

: You'll need to find the IP address of an email you want to trace. If you're
: on a Windows machine and/or using Outlook Express, this step is very
: dangerous. As far as I know, there's no way to get the originator's IP
: without openning an email. Since I'm on a Mac, I'm pretty safe from
: most virii.

:The first thing you want to do is to display the full header that came with
: the email.

: Handily enough, I just now received another Hybris worm for me to use
: as an example. The Spam Gods must be smiling on me today!


Hybris.gif

: I'm using Eudora, so I've displayed the full message header by toggling
: the "Blah Blah Blah" button. In Outlook, select the message and choose
: Edit > Properties. Not sure how to do it in Netscape.

: I've highlighted the important information. In blue we have the originator's
: server name (the domain name entry) and the IP address. In yellow we
: have the message ID that the server acc.haverford.edu used to log the
: message transmission.
: (You might have noticed that I've now received 30 attachments named
: "enano porno.exe" !)

: Stalking the Spammer :

: With the originator's IP address in hand, we hop over to
: http://samspade.org to do the dirty work. You can do this from your own
: computer, but samspade provides many handy tools with a web-interface.


samSpade_start.gif

: I first conduct a Whois query, an IP block query and a Tracerout. The Whois
: query returns ownership information that sometimes contains information
: about who owns the server that transmitted the email (which is typically the
: culprit's ISP's computer unless the asshole is running his own mail server).
: The IP Block returns information about who owns the range of IP addresses
: into which our spammer falls. This is crucial for making contact upstream of
: the sender. Finally, the Traceroute provides a transcript of machines that
: lie between SamSpade.org and the target IP address.

: Let's see what comes up from the queries.

 

: Creative :
.: Photography :.
.: Artistic :.
.: Blog :.
.: Thinking :.
.: Research :.

: Persona :
.: About :.
.: .plan :.
.: Vitae :.

: Website :
.: Search :.
.: Copyright :.
.: Sitemap :.
.: Links :.

© Aaron Clauset

updated 7.16.01