[PLUG] Open relays for spammers
Richard Langis Jr.
richard.langis at sun.com
Fri Jul 26 15:56:24 UTC 2002
When I set up my first linux server - RedHat 5.2 - Sendmail was
configured, BY DEFAULT, to relay mail from *anywhere*. Only when I
recieved a peice of spam that seemed to come from my own box did I
realize what was wrong and took steps to correct it.
About a year ago, there was someone from Russia asking for linux
distribution donations here on this list. Some of the donated
distributions could have been configured just as mine had been, and as
someone else mentioned, the howto's are generally written in english,
not russian. Perhaps all of the open relays are simply older
distributions with insecure default mail configurations?
I can easily imagine a newbie doing just this and then forgetting about
it... Especially if they have an ISP they use for mail and don't bother
with the imap/pop services their new server has available for them.
Thankfully, the distribution creators figured this out and fixed it in
the newer versions. At least...I HOPE they have. We can only hope that
some of these relays eventually upgrade, and the configuration problems
they had 'go away'. Of course, that would be in a near-perfect world. ;)
-R
Jim Adams wrote:
>
> Also as I mentioned before no where in the documentation did it say
> "Warning: By default this server is open relay, to turn it off do..."
> This comes back to the original question of "why are there so many open
> relay servers?" In this case it could be a combination of poor docs and
> slackerish(is that a word) admins.
--
s u n m i c r o s y s t e m s
~ Richard Langis Jr. ~
richard.langis at sun.com
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