Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2011-03-10 08:04 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2011-03-10 08:04 pm
Entry tags:
Spamhaus and LJ
[Edit: Kareila rightly brought my attention back to the fact that this is a problem for the people who haven't been getting comments, and pointed at http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml as a resource to check for comments in your journal, at least, even if you haven't been getting email notifications or inbox notifications.]
Someone in the news comments noticed that livejournal.com is currently listed on a Spamhaus blacklist.
The Spamhaus listing says:
My interpretation: Looking at the listing there, it seems to be that it's spammers hosting their warez on LJ, rather than other forms of bad behavior (like spammers spoofing email claiming to come from livejournal.com, or people reporting news post notifications as spam rather than retrieving/resetting their account info and unsubscribing). So if that is correct, then LJ would want to track down the spammers who have set up little nests on LJ, and root them out and destroy them.
Some of the spammers that are on LJ don't serial-add, don't spam communities, and don't comment, they just sit around in their own journals making spammy posts (and apparently emailing people to point them to those spammy posts). There are a lot of them.
As a user, I can't take action directly against them. But I can report spam in my own journal and in my comms. I can hang out on the Latest Posts page (http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml) and use the Report a Bot form (in the contextual hover menu, or at http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/bots.bml) to get more of the bots reported to the Abuse Prevention Team.
I don't know how many hours the team has had to devote to spamwhacking, but I know I can spare five or ten minutes to report some of the bots on that page. The more we report, accurately, the more they can zap. The more we report, the more information on the bots (the IP addresses they use, the email addresses, the email domains, the other patterns) they have to analyze.
I've spent nearly ten years on LJ, through all sorts of ups and downs. Spamhaus blacklisting LJ means it's serious. We've had our differences, but I want to keep LJ around, for myself and for my friends who have made their homes here. I can spare five or ten minutes reporting bots. Who's with me?
Someone in the news comments noticed that livejournal.com is currently listed on a Spamhaus blacklist.
LJ's IP is listed in the Spamhaus Blocking List because LJ is allowing Russian pharma spammers to abuse their service. Spamhaus is one of the most respected anti spam organizations in the world, and being listed there means they've ignored spammers on their network for quite a while and virtually no large ISP/email host wants their mail until they start acting like responsible Internet citizens.
http://www.spamhaus.org/Sbl/listings.lasso?isp=livejournal.com is the listing.astragali, in the news post from 9th March 2011
The Spamhaus listing says:
SBL104433
208.93.0.128/32 livejournal.com
02-Mar-2011 08:29 GMT
livejournal.com: Again used by botnet spammers to host
My interpretation: Looking at the listing there, it seems to be that it's spammers hosting their warez on LJ, rather than other forms of bad behavior (like spammers spoofing email claiming to come from livejournal.com, or people reporting news post notifications as spam rather than retrieving/resetting their account info and unsubscribing). So if that is correct, then LJ would want to track down the spammers who have set up little nests on LJ, and root them out and destroy them.
Some of the spammers that are on LJ don't serial-add, don't spam communities, and don't comment, they just sit around in their own journals making spammy posts (and apparently emailing people to point them to those spammy posts). There are a lot of them.
As a user, I can't take action directly against them. But I can report spam in my own journal and in my comms. I can hang out on the Latest Posts page (http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml) and use the Report a Bot form (in the contextual hover menu, or at http://www.livejournal.com/abuse/bots.bml) to get more of the bots reported to the Abuse Prevention Team.
I don't know how many hours the team has had to devote to spamwhacking, but I know I can spare five or ten minutes to report some of the bots on that page. The more we report, accurately, the more they can zap. The more we report, the more information on the bots (the IP addresses they use, the email addresses, the email domains, the other patterns) they have to analyze.
I've spent nearly ten years on LJ, through all sorts of ups and downs. Spamhaus blacklisting LJ means it's serious. We've had our differences, but I want to keep LJ around, for myself and for my friends who have made their homes here. I can spare five or ten minutes reporting bots. Who's with me?
no subject
Have we come full circle here or what? =/ Or is it more like a dog chasing its own tail?
Ahem, anyway. Permission to repost this to my journal, with credit to you?
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Go right ahead and repost. I'm hoping that this will help, though I suspect that more people for Abuse would probably also help. :\
no subject
And thanks! At least, if it helps one more person aware of the problem so that they'll know to use the tools at their disposal to report the spam, that's one more step towards combatting it.
And yeah, I can't imagine how overextended the Abuse Team must be now. =/ I'd apply, except I don't have the time, and I don't think I have the right skills to handle some of the more sensitive cases anyway. =/ But it sounds like they could use extra hands more than ever.
no subject
Well, that plus I don't really need to be taking on even more obligations in my life right now :)
no subject