[SURBL-Discuss] Most often "hit" SURBL domains

David B Funk dbfunk at engineering.uiowa.edu
Thu Sep 30 03:59:51 CEST 2004


On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Jeff Chan wrote:

> On Wednesday, September 29, 2004, 4:48:36 PM, Raymond Dijkxhoorn wrote:
> > Hi!
>
> >> I have a similar idea. Would it be possible to have a running list of the
> >> top 20 (or so... 50? 100?) most often queried URI's that are blocked by
> >> SURBL (and which should be blocked)? This way, we could take additional
> >> pressure off SURBL DNS servers by blacklisting these domains locally BEFORE
> >> doing SURBL checking on such messages?
> >>
> >> I have a feeling that this has already been requested and implemented??
>
> > Its something that is suggested, and we are looking into ways to getting
> > that inside for example SA3.1, the SA guys also had some suggestions.
>
> > So yes, excellent idea... ;)
>
> Yes, SA is adding a feature to hardcode or have a database of
> the 125 most often hit whitelist domains to 3.1 or 3.0.1.
> This will prevent domains like w3.org, yahoo.com, etc. from
> even being queried.
>
> One issue is with the top spammer domains is that unlike the
> whitehats, the big spammer domains tend to change over time.
> The biggest spammers also seem to be the most dynamic.
>
> So the whitehats may work better with local listing than the
> blackhats.
>
> This is certainly a good idea though.  Note that Eric Kolve
> also built in local black and whitelists to SpamCopURI.
>
> Jeff C.

A far better way to effect this is to just increase the TTL on those
long-term blackhat domains. (A static list is effectively an
infinitly large TTL, query once and keep for ever).

The static whitelist is necessary as it is not possible to tune the
per-query NAK TTL, and you want the general NAK TTL to be low to
improve responsiveness of "add" events.
(Hmm, there's a thought, modify a DNS server to hand out customized
TTLs on particular NAK responses).


You -can- tune the postive TTL on a per entry basis. So for the
long-term blackhats just give them a large (say 24 hours) TTL
and their querys will drop way down.

This presupposes that all client sites are running a locally
caching DNS server. Any body -not- doing that should be banished
and dis-allowed from using SURBL.


-- 
Dave Funk                                  University of Iowa
<dbfunk (at) engineering.uiowa.edu>        College of Engineering
319/335-5751   FAX: 319/384-0549           1256 Seamans Center
Sys_admin/Postmaster/cell_admin            Iowa City, IA 52242-1527
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