CASL botnet take down

biohazardmailThe CRTC served its first ever warrant as part of an international botnet takedown. The warrant was to take down a C&C (command and control) server for Win32/Dorkbot. International efforts to take down C&C servers take a lot of effort and work and coordination. I’ve only ever heard stories from folks involved but the scale and work that goes into these take downs is amazing.
Bots are still a problem. Even if we manage to block 99% of the botnet mail out there people are still getting infected. Those infections spread and many of the newer bots steal passwords, banking credentials and other confidential information.
This kind of crime is hard to stop, though, because the internet makes it so easy to live in one country, have a business in a third, have a shell corp in a fourth, and have victims in none of those places. Law enforcement across the globe has had to work together and develop new protocols and new processes to make these kinds of takedowns work.
 

Looking forward
November 2015: The month in email

Related Posts

CRTC fines Compu-Finder $1.1 million for CASL violations

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is the principle agency tasked with enforcing Canada’s anti-spam law. Today they issued a Notice of Violation to Compu-Finder  including a $1.1 million dollar fine for 4 violations of CASL. The violations include sending unsolicited email and having a non-working unsubscribe link. According to the CRTC, complaints about Compu-Finder accounted for 26% of all complaints submitted about this industry sector.
This is the first major fine announced under CASL.
One of the first things that jumped out at me about this is the action was taken against B2B mail. There are a lot of senders out there who think nothing of sending unsolicited emails to business addresses. In my experience, many B2B senders think permission is much less important for them than B2C senders. I think that this enforcement action demonstrates that, at least to the CRTC, permission is required for B2B mail.
The other thing that jumped out is that given the extent of the complaints (26%) the financial penalties were only slightly more than 10% of the $10M maximum penalty. It seems the CRTC is not blindly applying the maximum penalty, but is instead actually applying some discretion to the fines.
I’ve looked for the actual notice of violation, but haven’t been able to find a copy. If I find it, I will share.
 
 
 
 

Read More

Whirlwind that is M3AAWG

It’s been a great conference, and it’s only about half done. As is common at these conferences, I write down lots of things we should do and need to publish. The difference is now that we are growing I may have the time to put the polish on them and get them published.
Today’s keynote discussed the economics of botnet mitigation. Michel van Eeten from Delft University of Technology presented information compiled from some different datasets about botnets.
Good news
Botnet infection rates are relatively stable. They’ve not spiraled out of control like some people were predicting.
Interesting news
More than 50% of bot infections are contained on 50 ISPs in the entire world.
Bad news
Centers set up specifically to fix botnet infections don’t really have a big impact on infection cure rate.
Good news
ISP actions and walled gardens do have an impact on infection cure rates.
The biggest take away from the session is that ISPs are critical in both protecting from infection and helping users cure infection once it happens.

Read More

CASL enforcement

As most people know, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) went into effect July 1 of this year. This month, the CRTC concluded its first investigation.

Read More