My e-mail to cms-list participant and "listmom"
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Subj: Flakey Internet... Boston Globe article today on "blocklists"
Hi Chris (and greetings to listmom, whom I'd also written about this),
Thanks for your note back.
On Wednesday 27 August 2003 07:39 pm, Chris Harrington wrote:
> Yes, I got both of your emails. The Internet has been overall pretty
> flakey the past week.
This error message is what I got yesterday, trying to post to the list, and I noticed then the domain "osirusoft.com".
=== Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender ===================
<cms-list@cms-list.org%gt;: host ashiya.cms-list.org[64.81.246.22] said: 554
Service unavailable; [64.117.224.150] blocked using
dialups.relays.osirusoft.com (in reply to RCPT TO command)
=================================================
Then at my morning breakfast table, the Boston Globe spilled the beans on what'd happened (!). (Is this what they mean by "convergence"? ;^0) )
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/08/28/saboteurs_hit_spams_blockers/
=== Osirusoft.com excerpt ===============================
"The attackers have managed to drive one popular blocklist entirely offline. On Tuesday, Californian Joe Jared shut down his Osirusoft blocklist in an unexpected manner. Jared blocklisted all Internet addresses worldwide. As a result, businesses that relied on his list were suddenly unable to receive any e-mail at all, even legitimate e-mail.
"He said . . . I'm going to blacklist the world. And by golly, he did," said Jim Miller, network administrator at Simutronics Corp., a St. Charles, Mo., firm that formerly used the Osirusoft blocklist.
Jared expressed regret for the way he shut down his blocklist. "I thought there had to be a better way to do it," Jared said. "But there wasn't."
Jared said his blocklist server also hosted the website for his small business, which makes shoe inserts for people with foot problems. He couldn't shut down the blocklist server without also closing his business website, so he chose to make the blocklist unusable by blocking everything.
He said he'd spent weeks trying to fend off the denial of service attacks against his servers, but "they just beat the hell out of them . . . I just can't be attacked like that."
Jared isn't sure he'll ever run a blocklist again. "What I am going to do is take a vacation," he said. "I need one.""
=== /Osirusoft.com excerpt ===============================