North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Anti-Spam Router -- opinions?

  • From: Matthew Crocker
  • Date: Mon Apr 05 11:45:28 2004 

On Apr 5, 2004, at 10:49 AM, Andy Johnson wrote:

Has anyone had any experience with this device? Turntide.com. Looks like a
traffic-shaping device designed specifically for cutting down spammers
throughput to your inbound SMTP servers. My main concern is, how does it
make the distinction between legitimate mass-mailings (e.g.: mailing lists
such as this one), and spam? Interesting approach to killing spam though I
must say.

Sounds like YABA (Yet Another Band Aid) solution for spam. If rate-limiting the spam packets does an effective job at killing spam. It will only make the spammers switch to a distrubuted attack method using trojaned virus hosts sending 1 mail message at a time. They are already doing this in some cases. SPAM is a living breathing entity that can learn and adapt. The smarter the network gets at killing it off, the smarter it gets in attacking. The evolution of spam/viruses is astounding and getting quicker all the time. The turntide box may be a good solution but it is expensive, I'll wait for the SNORT add-on that does the same thing ;)

-Matt