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Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

toad.social

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Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#131

Post by globular-toast »

upofadown wrote: post #64
globular-toast wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As it is, there is not even a way for a known email sender to securely introduce an unknown email sender. You know, the way that regular human people normally are able to transfer identities from one to the other. That's exactly what PGP's web of trust model is for. Someone you know, and trust, can sign and send you a public key of someone that they trust. This new key will be automatically trusted in your trust st…

Well, yeah, we should use preexisting standards and OpenPGP would be perfectly fine here and is probably the best choice. That is a wheel we do not need to reinvent. But the actual system used to do the signatures and keep track of the reputation is the last thing we should be thinking about at this point. We should instead concentrate on how to create a system that the majority of people can use and understand. We s…

Right, that is my point. I feel like there is a fundamental lack of understanding in the vast majority of the population about trust. We haven't helped by telling people "you can trust the little green padlock". Nobody asks "why should I trust it?". That is the problem. It really doesn't matter what technology we provide, so far none of it is really used by regular people to establish trust.

The other option, of course, is to design a trustless system, like BitCoin, but that has its own problems.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#132

Post by robocat »

elcritch wrote: post #121
smithkl42 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the CTO of a US-based insurance company. Apart from some reinsurers in London and Bermuda, and a couple contractors in Canada, we don't do business outside the US. We've blocked all countries except those, and it has cut down massively on the folks attacking us.

Lots of companies do this on their websites now using cloud flare or something similar. It’s practical. Still it’s frustrating as a user when you’re traveling over in Europe and can’t access your accounts to pay bills or whatnot.

Next time I travel overseas I'll have a VPN ready.

My bank had some technical problem that prevented access from overseas last time I traveled and I couldn't access my account (which was extremely inconvenient).

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#133

Post by aftbit »

ziddoap wrote: post #115
kasey_junk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those countries likely have a higher chance of real traffic as well. If I’m doing business in Nigeria then obviously I can’t block it even if it ranks high on the threat level.

Yes, obviously you don't block the countries you plan to do business with. I got that much. It probably makes sense to leave the US out of the list, assuming the CableNinja is in North America. The rest seems pretty arbitrarily chosen, though. JumpCrisscross gave no additional context to why they left out Ukraine, Brazil, India, UK, when picking countries from the list they linked. They have higher cybercrime index r…

Let me throw out a guess: Ukraine is a wartime ally, Brazil is the seventh largest country in the world, India is the first, and the UK speaks English and has a lot of connections to USA.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#134

Post by johnisgood »

simiones wrote: post #129
johnisgood wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is a good-enough answer for my grandma? :P

There's no great answer, unfortunately. Gmail and other off-the-shelf email providers handle much of the spam and some of the scam prevention for you, but you still need to exercise caution on your own.

I agree, and even less so for my grandma, honestly.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#135

Post by liveoneggs »

blacklion wrote: post #127
zelon88 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an issue with an outdated locally hosted IP2 Location database.

Google thinks it is in Russia too. And Cloudflare thinks the same.

maybe you actually have a MITM proxy stealing all of your traffic and keystrokes

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#136

Post by elcritch »

robocat wrote: post #132
elcritch wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of companies do this on their websites now using cloud flare or something similar. It’s practical. Still it’s frustrating as a user when you’re traveling over in Europe and can’t access your accounts to pay bills or whatnot.

Next time I travel overseas I'll have a VPN ready. My bank had some technical problem that prevented access from overseas last time I traveled and I couldn't access my account (which was extremely inconvenient).

Commercial VPNs are often blocked too. I found a p2p vpn to my home network + ssh socks5 proxy to work well.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#137

Post by JumpCrisscross »

aftbit wrote: post #133
ziddoap wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, obviously you don't block the countries you plan to do business with. I got that much. It probably makes sense to leave the US out of the list, assuming the CableNinja is in North America. The rest seems pretty arbitrarily chosen, though. JumpCrisscross gave no additional context to why they left out Ukraine, Brazil, India, UK, when picking countries from the list they linked. They have higher cybercrime index r…

Let me throw out a guess: Ukraine is a wartime ally, Brazil is the seventh largest country in the world, India is the first, and the UK speaks English and has a lot of connections to USA.

They're each also popular IT outsourcing destinations who aren't sanctioned. You may not do business in Ukraine or Brazil, but chances are one of your customers or contractors do, and blocking those IPs isn't usually in the first or second swipe. (If you're blocking the UK and India, you're probably blocking all foreign IPs.)

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#138

Post by Jzush »

My biggest problem with SPF, DKIM, DMARC is when you go to test this crap there's really only commercial apps. So people who are setting up things for a non-profit or a personal project are either forced to pay after doing 3 or 4 test emails or you wait like 24 hours or some crap.

And all that just for the privilege of being able to send email to some gmail accounts. Trying to get email to properly encrypt is pulling teeth and yet I still get hundreds of thousands of spam a month on my gmail account.

Any time I have to set up an email server on a new system I just kind of die a little.

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#139

Post by edm0nd »

ziddoap wrote: post #106
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I blocked 7 countries Russia, China, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, Iran and Belarus [1]? [1] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-...

How/why did you pick these 7? Using your link: Ukraine, USA, UK, Brazil, & India all rank higher than Iran and Belarus. US & Ukraine rank higher than Nigeria and Romania.

We (a US org) block all countries listed on the OFAC list

https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...

Re: Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

#140

Post by carlosjobim »

Suzuran wrote: post #65
nextn wrote: post #53

Spammers are worse at something no one tried to use AFAIK: require a fee to deliver email.

You may be surprised to learn that spammers, being criminals, have no issue with stealing money from others to spend on email delivery fees. Edit: Proof-of-work "email postage" schemes are similarly doomed - The botnet that zero-day'd your mail servers does not care how much electricity they use.

Criminals yes, criminal spammers no. If they could make money with other crime there would be no point in wasting their time with sending spam.
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