Hi,
It seems like people who were not too optimistic when the number of active spamming sites on Geocities dropped from more than 300 to 14 on Friday were unfortunately right.
Yahoo / Geocities did not make anything to prevent spammers from (ab)using their service and only used the list once to remove their (old and unused) spam related sites, but did nothing to prevent spammers from building new spammy sites all over again. Today, Geocities still makes the bulk of spammy sites on the list (total 368) and in the last 2 days, they only closed down 6 of them, that's below 2% !
One thing we learned last friday is that Yahoo / Geocities are not only fully aware of the situation, but they are monitoring this list.
Here is the current active list: http://nospam.mailpeers.net/alive_spammy.txt
I thought maybe it's difficult to detect those sites, maybe spammers are very crafty and make it hard to separate their redirection pages from other non spammy pages, so I started analyzing the pages content and here is what I found:
- More than 95% of Geocities spammy sites are redirections (the balance being 'click here' manual redirections). - there is a surprisingly low number of variation in those redirection scripts - The more spammy tries to obfuscate his scripts, the more the signs are evident and easy to detect. - only 11 rules have detected *all* redirection scripts to this date. - Non redirection sites are simply detected by the URIs they contain (blacklist now, I hope to add SURBL support soon). - hometown.aol.com *DOES NOT USE ANTIVIRUS !* on their user data. As a result, they end up being a malware hosting heaven ! (even if they remove some of them when they get complaints) http://nospam.mailpeers.net/alive_spammy_malware.txt - hometown.aol.com non malware sites are *all* using the same randomized redirection script - tripod.com seems to be handling the problem perfectly (unless my sampling is severely biased, send me more) and in the rare cases where a spammer tries to use them, the spammy site is usually shutdown before I list it. Fight the spammies, and they'll move away. Why are the others not doing the same ?
You'll find the complete analysis results for all alive spammy sites on this page (updated regularly): http://nospam.mailpeers.net/alive_spammy2.txt
I also added http://nospam.mailpeers.net/fresh_alive_spammy.txt that lists the most recent entries (first one is the most recent). These sites are actively used in current spam runs (The ones you *really* want down !)
In cases where spammy does not encrypt his redirector, extracting the real target URL behind the redirector is a piece of cake. They end up here, along with blacklisted ones, in http://nospam.mailpeers.net/spammy_targets.txt (with country code) Some of them (but not all) are already listed in SURBL.
BTW, is there a script (bash, perl, whatever) that simply decodes URIs and query SURBL ?
I won't distribute the rules, since their effectiveness would be immediately impaired, but if the Yahoo guy or the AOL guy want them, I'd be glad to share... however, at least for Yahoo/Geocities, I have no illusions.
The very low number of variation makes me wonder. Is it because all spammers use the same spamware to generate their redirection pages, or are only a selected few of them 'allowed' to (ab)use Geocities for their redirection needs ?
------------
So, what's next ?
hometown.aol.com is actually shutting down some sites, but it's too few, too late. They need to be more proactive. the worst problem with their service being the presence of malware. A list member sent me a reporting address for hometown.aol.com abuses, I'll see if it works, and if so, it will become automatic.
Yahoo/Geocities is a different beast. After months of well known abuse and minimal action, I think they deserve being treated as a spam ressource provider.
Just like other spam ressource providers, they can get away with it just as long as their regular customers are not aware of their activities.
Their parent company being Yahoo, it's completely useless to complain to their upstream ;-) but they have to protect Yahoo's corporate image. If yahoo sees a serious risk that their name will be associated with spam support / illegal activities, a *real* change will occur.
I think I've done my homework collecting enough proof of Yahoo/Geocities's refusal to stop the spam support activities taking place on their network and that it could be used as a starting point in gathering enough evidence (+insiders info?) to issue a well researched press release.
Obviously, since (as you might have noticed !) English is not my main language and I'm not familiar with the press, this is a call for volunteers for the additional data collection and redaction work.
Regards,
Eric
------------
PS-1: If you operate Spamassassin 3.xx, you can share all the Geocities / AOL / tripod URIs in the messages going through your server in near real time. All it takes is a 4 lines patch in URIDNSBL.pm and a simple cron job. PS-2:I'd like to have independent third party daily backups of the whole nospam.mailpeers.net subdomain. It's small, and a simple wget -r -w3 would do. If you want to do it, email me so that I'm aware of it.