Starving Junk Mail with The *nix Ecosystem on the Desktop
Faye is painting and moving the office to a new building. The old one nearby, serving CADTEk since 1992, is also getting a facelift (big time renovating, painting, redecorating, etc.) and will shortly open with a ’surprise’ shop, shhh…
All nice and happy, but what’s that having to do with spamming, phishing and net crimes? Not much actually, just that Faye said to herself “how about cleaning the 1,000s mails in my inbox” to keep with the trend. And she was spending more than a day brooming her Outlook. At one point, Faye wrote to me asking why on earth is she getting an average of 200 junk mails per day. Ugh, 200 a day, that’s quite uncomfortable!
I wasn’t counting the spam per day I was getting, because it’s minimal, no big deal. Yet I promised Faye to track it for couple weeks then compare results and find a conclusion leading to a solution. My tracking started Monday, Feb.12th and ended Sunday, Feb.25th. The worst day (Monday, Feb.19th) I received 15 junk messages. The best day (Wednesday, Feb.14th) I received only one. Oh, and that’s also important: my KDE/Kontact inbox collects mail traffic from a total of 20+ email accounts of mine, 3/4 of these forwarding to a final layer of 5 accounts the way tributary rivers are flowing into parent rivers. The entire email-ecosystem I’m feeding upon runs on a variety of servers and domains, geographically located in the US, Germany and Hungary. Faye agrees she’s harvesting mails from a smaller ecosystem, mind you.
Now why is she getting 200+ junk messages a day, and I’m only getting 10+. The odds would be against me, because I’m more exposed to capture large amounts of junk given the numerous accounts and the geographical spread. How do we explain this?
Well, the simplest answer which came to mind is that I never logged in to the internet from an MS Windows machine during the last three years. My workplace gravitates around SuSE Linux on the desktop and on the laptop. The servers I’m managing are either on Debian Linux or FreeBSD.
Faye’s getting traffic mostly from the same servers as I do, just that her desktop and laptop are on Win XP. The freakin’ zombie machines bloated with trojans, rootkits, worms and whatnot hidden script phoning home and actually parasiting the CPU and the broadband link. Much of this happens in a silent backstage mode, leaving the unsuspecting user happily do her designs, bookkeeping and productivity work on the zombie workstation. The side effect of this pest gives a visible 200+ junk mails a day.
One other day we’re gonna talk about defining a security perimeter for your small biz company network, both for the intranet as well as for the extranet (and why you should consider balancing these two). Until then, here’s a helpful link for you to read:
10 Steps to Creating Your Own IT Security Audit
And here a web tool to give you and idea on hunting down the pest generators on the internet. Always take care to thoroughly discern between the victim and the perpetrator.
Faye considers moving to Linux on her DELL desktops and workstations once she’s getting more time to breathe. Plus the word is out that DELL will be selling Linux pre-installed machines, how convenient…
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