Huge spam blacklist for sale. Or is it?
p2pnet news view P2P:- Would you pay $1,000,000 for spam?
Some people would.
“It comes with great sadness that I have to announce the imminent closure of SORBS,” posts its Australian owner, Michelle Sullivan (”Previously known as Matthew Sullivan”).
SORBS is among the world’s largest spam blacklists and more recently, “Initial contact regarding ‘Buy out’ have been received from large anti-spam vendors,” says Michelle, going on »»»
60+ Offers of hosting have been received, unfortunately most whilst generous are impossible to use in the short time available. SORBS cannot move to new hosts in the time available. SORBS, does need short term 42RU hosting to consider moving to other hosts.
SORBS has had 2 offers of hosting within the Queensland/North New South Wales area, one of which is by a top hosting company in Australia.
The result is at this present time I, Michelle Sullivan, feel that SORBS will not close on the date specified, though there maybe some small outages around this time.
All offers are welcome, and all offers will receive a response.
Thank you for your continuing support.
Says the site »»»
The Spam and Open Relay Blocking System (SORBS) was conceived as an anti-spam project where a daemon would check “on-the-fly”, all servers from which it received email to determine if that email was sent via various types of proxy and open-relay servers. The daemon was not particularly well written and served as a lesson in programming for its original author, Matthew Sullivan.
The daemon still exists and works, though with the latest computer piracy by spammers being hijacking by way of trojans, there are not many servers stopped. If you are interested in the daemon it is available for download and use at: http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/sorbs/. However, during November 2001, the daemon was deployed alongside a number of prominent mailservers that received around 1 million emails per day. The result was a database of approximately 78,000 proxy servers collected over a 2 month period.
The SORBS DNSBL was born in November 2002. It was felt that by publicising a list of compromised hosts, the ever-increasing flow of spam through those hosts could be stopped. On January 6, 2003, the SORBS DNSBL was officially launched to the public.
Since those initial 78,000 proxies, the SORBS DNSBL has grown to an astounding 3 million listed hosts (that’s less than 0.07% of the possible addresses on the internet – statistics correct as of June 2004). SORBS has also expanded over time to include hacked and hijacked servers, formmail scripts, trojan infestations (particularly those with backdoors), and more recently made the move to pre-emptively list all dynamically allocated IP address space.
Other recent innovations are the SORBS spam firewall, which is in testing, and will be released as soon as SORBS Technologies Pty Ltd completes testing and develops a market strategy (we’ll keep you posted there). Also, SORBS provides its lists for groups such as Team Cymru DarkNet Project and the Australian Communications and Media Authority, with a view to listing and shutting down as many infected/trojaned machines as possible.
If anyone would like to contribute to SORBS or has any suggestions for new detection routines, and/or hosts to be listed, the SORBS team would love to hear from you. Please use the Mail/Contact Form to get in touch and discuss your thoughts.
Stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
SORBS – June, 2009
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June 30th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
now this gives me an idea.
create a fake spam list and sell it on ebay….
could fetch a good penny and i doubt they would try to counter sue for false advertisement considering their industry
June 30th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
@Reader’s Write
Interesting idea, but because of the lack of a guarantee (as you said), most people aren’t going to buy that kind of thing unless they know that the seller is reputable.