Wandering Thoughts archives

Weekly spam summary on October 14, 2006

This week, we:

• got 13,890 messages from 262 different IP addresses.
• handled 18,923 sessions from 1,185 different IP addresses.
• received 187,506 connections from at least 50,091 different IP addresses.
• hit a highwater of 22 connections being checked at once.

Connection volume is up again from last week, but everything else is down. Things fluctuated over the week:

Day	Connections	different IPs
Sunday	24,385	+6,671
Monday	31,929	+8,310
Tuesday	32,554	+9,304
Wednesday	27,740	+8,344
Thursday	22,182	+5,557
Friday	26,631	+6,431
Saturday	22,085	+5,474

Kernel level packet filtering top ten:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes
213.4.149.12          62524   3251K
193.70.192.0/24        6103    275K
219.128.0.0/12         4367    213K
61.128.0.0/10          4270    230K
72.244.103.210         3993    187K
207.218.78.123         3562    178K
212.51.32.187          2965    130K
212.216.176.0/24       2841    144K
84.160.0.0/11          2813    139K
199.34.64.220          2478    149K

The overall numbers are down from last week, especially for single IP addresses.

• 213.4.149.12 returns from last week.
• 72.244.103.210 returns from August, still a covad.net 'dialup'.
• 207.218.78.123 is on the NJABL.
• 212.51.32.187 is a mundo-r.com outgoing SMTP gateway; they tried to send us a bunch of advance fee fraud spam this week.
• 199.34.64.220 tried to send us a bunch of phish spam that had already hit our spamtraps.

Connection time rejection stats:

  42288 total
  19382 dynamic IP
  19198 bad or no reverse DNS
   2078 class bl-cbl
    396 class bl-dsbl
    255 class bl-sdul
    135 class bl-njabl
    117 class bl-spews
    110 cuttingedgemedia.com
     37 class bl-sbl
     19 class bl-ordb

Three out of the top 30 most rejected IP addresses were rejected 100 times or more, with the leader being 124.120.103.16 (136 times). 23 of the top 30 are currently in the CBL, 10 are currently in bl.spamcop.net, and one, 208.32.133.155, is part of SBL45150, the Cutting Edge Media SBL listing.

So much for them going away, evidently.

This week, Hotmail gave to us:

• no messages accepted.
• no messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail email addresses.
• 27 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 7 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hit our spamtraps.
• no messages refused due to their origin IP address

And the final numbers:

what	# this week	(distinct IPs)	# last week	(distinct IPs)
Bad HELOs	640	68	1532	118
Bad bounces	172	140	358	317

The champion source of bad HELO names is 216.229.190.42 (126 times), followed by 69.27.248.94 (75 times). Many of the bad bounces continue to come from Eastern Europe, and the pattern of bad usernames being mostly Slavic female names continues. We did have one bounce to 3E4B, from the same IP address as last week's (83.110.221.99).