== Looking more deeply into some SMTP authentication probes Back when I wrote about [[how fast spammers showed up to probe our new authenticated SMTP service SpammerFastArrival]], I said: > [...] I can see that in fact the only people who have gotten > far enough to actually try to authenticate are a few of our own > users. Since our authenticated SMTP service is still in testing and > hasn't been advertised, I suspect that some people are using MUAs (or > other software) that simply try authenticated SMTP against their IMAP > server just to see if it works. Ha ha. Silly me. Nothing as innocent as this is what's actually going on. When I looked into this in more detail, I noticed that the IP addresses making these SMTP authentication attempts were completely implausible for the users involved (unless, for example, some of them had abruptly relocated to Eastern Europe). Further, some of the time the authentication attempts were against usernames that were their full email addresses ('@ourdomain') instead of just their login name. But they were all real usernames, which is what I noticed first. What I think has to be going on is that attackers are mining actual email addresses from domains in order to determine (or guess) the logins to try for SMTP authentication probes, rather than following the SSH pattern of brute force attacks against a long laundry list of login names. This makes a lot of sense for attackers; why waste time and potentially set off alerts when you can do a more targeted attack using resources that are already widely available (namely, lists of email addresses at target domains). (Not all of the logins that have been tried so far are currently valid ones, but all but one of them have been valid in the past or at least appear in web searches.) So far there's only been a small volume of these probes. It's quite possible that in the long run these will turn out to be in the minority and the only reason I'm noticing them right now is that other attackers have yet to discover us and start more noisy bulk attempts. (I suspect that at least some of the attackers are doing this because of the presence of the DNS name 'smtp.cs.toronto.edu'.)