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I still this this was one of the best contributions to Eurovision Song Contest 2009 and she deserved a much better position than she got

La voix – Official Video from Malena Ernman on Vimeo.

And her personal webpage you can find here.

If anyone is interested in setting up Linux based (open source) solutions I can highly recommend Howtoforge. They have for instance different antispam solutions, mail servers, web howtos, cluster guides and a lot of other things. And everything is for free.

I read a post saying that basically everything in a mail can be forged so technologies like SPF and DKIM are no guarantee that the mail comes from whoever it claims to be from. Ok, that is correct. But, fortunately – most spam senders are not that sophisticated. So, using DKIM and/or SPF together with blocklists from Spamhaus / Spamcop and a decent antivirus software will still keep you relatively spam free. Spam senders are like people in general, they are lazy and doesn’t want to put too much effort into something that might not be worth it, easier to go after the masses that doesn’t even care about basic mail security than to put loads of effort into a small number of targets that probably are unlikely to click on the spam links even if the mail should get through.

What I am saying might be true, and for me it is, for small businesses and individuals; it is not true for large corporations and government mail systems. There the effort might be worth doing targeted attacks. Let’s say some lowlife spammer can get a trojan onto the computer of a CFO or CEO for a large corporation, then they might get information worth a lot to that company, and can extort them. Or, it might also be true for companies who make their living by being online, like online gaming sites. Even a short Denial of service is worth a lot for them, and I assume they are being extorted already.

I found a very interesting spam article, here’s a small portion of it, and link to the entire article below:

Spammers began as a minor annoyance, but they now control the Internet. Any critic that becomes sufficiently threatening is systematically attacked by an international network of zombie computers able to remove dissenting voices and activities from the Internet. Anyone who claims that a particular named party is a spammer is likely to be sued until he can no longer bear the legal burden, regardless of the truth of his claims. In most countries, the majority of e-mail traffic consists of spam, and the numbers get worse by the day. In practical terms, that means legitimate users of the Internet are now visitors, tourists, whose presence is tolerated by the real owners of the Internet — spammers.

Link to article

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

In the U.S., Facebook and Twitter are still under siege from the Windows-based Katrina Storm botnet. Google, however, reports that search delays are now down to an average of three seconds. Things have gone from bad to worse in Japan and Reunified Korea, though, as attacks from former North Korean cyberwarfare units using the Windows-based MyDoom VII botnet have locked down all financial and government Web sites. That’s still better than Israel, where, according to landline phone reports, attacks from the so-called Sons of Eichmann cyberterrorist group using the Windows botnet New Cyxymu have totally frozen the country’s Internet access.

Sound like science fiction? I wish it were. I think it’s a fair prediction of where we’re going if we don’t stop Windows-based botnet distributed denial-of-service attacks.

We’ve already seen countries like Estonia and Georgia knocked off the Internet by Russia-based hackers using botnets. Google was slowed to a crawl by a similar attack, and South Korean and U.S. business and government Web sites were hammered earlier this year. The The early-August attack on Twitter and Facebook, which stopped Twitter in its tracks and brought Facebook to its knees, was only the latest in a series of damaging DDoS attacks.

This is only going to get worse. Windows’ insecurity has allowed millions of PCs to turn into soldiers in botnet armies. Most of the time, their controllers are happy to let these systems quietly churn out hundreds of millions of spam e-mails a day. Or, as in the case of the Clampi Trojan, which has infected up to a million Windows PCs, silently steal credit card information.

Now, however, botnets are being used for more than just the criminal activities of social misfits eager to make a quick buck off of naive users. They’re being used to attack businesses, countries and, in the case of the attack that busted up the social networks this month, one individual, a pro-Georgia blogger.

Think about that. Every major Western social network was brought to its knees because a small group of people were ticked off at one guy.

We can’t let this continue. Catching the botnet masters has proved to be close to impossible. So we’re going to have to try another approach.

The only way I can see of doing it is to choke off the botnets. Since all — I repeat all — botnets run on poorly secured Windows systems, I think Internet service providers have to either block compromised PCs from getting to the Internet in the first place or force-feed security upgrades into them.

We already know Microsoft can’t fix Windows’ security problems. Every month brings yet another Patch Tuesday full of fixes for major vulnerabilities, yet Microsoft never catches up with Windows’ security holes. It never will. Windows started out without network security, and every fix since Windows for Workgroups has been one patch on top of another, right through to Windows 7.

We also know education won’t do the job. Anyone with a higher-than-room-temperature IQ already has security software and keeps up to date with patches. Let’s be kind and assume that 90% of the Windows-using population does this. That leaves, what, about 100 million Windows PCs in the world available for botnet deployment?

Yuck! I don’t like those odds!

No, the only solution is for ISPs to start checking Windows PCs in at the Internet gate, and if they don’t pass a minimum security check, we don’t allow them in. If an ISP doesn’t join up with this posse, cut it off from the rest of the Internet. This really is a case where if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

Don’t like it? Tough. It’s either that or we’re all going to get stuck with an Internet that’s tied into knots by 2011.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was cutting-edge and 300bit/sec. was a fast Internet connection — and we liked it! He can be reached at sjvn@vna1.com.

Source: Computerworld

Now spam levels are back to normal, so it was just a temporary drop I presume.

Every domain owner could do a simple task to reduce the amount of mail, that is to implement either DKIM or SPF. They are different technologies to determine that the sender of a message has permission to send mail as that domain. The big difference between DKIM and SPF is that SPF will generally give an error if you forward a message. Let’s say you recieve a message from *@ibm.com to your Yahoo mailbox. But you have a forward policy to your corporate mail of everything that comes to your Yahoo mail. So, Yahoo tries to send this mail to your corporate mail, but the mail is rejected. It is rejected because Yahoo doesn’t have permission to send mail as if they came from ibm.com. This problem is something that DKIM has solved.

This is not rocket science, and most companies and domain owners should be able to implement one of the technologies without too much problem. So, make it happen.

There are excellent guides on for instance Howtoforge.com on how to set up spam filters.

Is the amounts of spam being sent dropping? I find this a bit strange, since historically spam have always increased with a drop now and then when really bad spammers were unplugged. But this time I set up a mail server, the amount of spam I recieve is just a couple of hundred per day, it used to be easily 4-5 times more in the past. I have to check this out. I know a lot of people and companies are discussing ways of reducing spam bots ways to communicate and for ISP’s to disallow the use of port 25 by having their enforced mail relay. However, I thought most of that was just talk, and that very little were actually done.

But, if the world’s major ISP’s really wanted to do their bit to fight spam there are some easy steps that would go a long way:

• block the use of port 25 (SMTP) except to their own mail relay, which would of course clean out spam and virus
• limit connectivity for people whose computers had been infected with bots
• not to sell bandwidth or internet access to companies involved in sending spam

These steps would be quite easy for any ISP to implement and would not require huge investments, but the benefits would be great in terms of reducing spam.

Often, countries in former Soviet Union, South America, China and Africa are blamed for the majority of spam being sent. However, western ISP’s isn’t cleaning up their own systems either. If the western ISP’s could form some community and agree on a few simple actions, like the ones described above, it would be much easier to influence other contries to follow suit. Well, apart from countries like China who doesn’t seem intent on playing on the same terms as the other kids. As we saw on the Climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 where Chinese delegates deliberately sabotaged environment proposals.

It’s time for countries all over the world to take this seriously and start cooperating.

Quite interesting, shortly after I wrote this I stumbled on a text written by the swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt about Internet Freedom, cooperation and protection of infrastructure. I would like to think my own article was along the same lines as his statement was. You can find his article here.

Jahapp, då har jag installerat om min server igen och fått på Wordpress. Detta händer med jämna mellanrum, läs när jag blir uttråkad. Servern var en Windowsserver ett tag, den fungerade bra, men min kunskap om IIS är mycket sämre än on Apache, så det blev att jag installerade om den igen. Jag skriver mer snart, skall slutföra installationen bara