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February 1, 2005

Big surge in spam from AOL

As you probably heard, about a month ago, AOL reported a sharp decrease in both the amount of spam hitting its filters and the number of spam complaints from its members. That's the good news.

But in recent days, there have been complaints of a big surge in spam apparently emanating from dial-up AOL accounts. This is a big surprise, since AOL has blocks in place to prevent users from sending spam out onto the Internet -- and those "port 25" blocks have effectively eliminated outbound spam.

Turns out that spammers discovered a chink in AOL's armor. Carl Hutzler, the big ISP's chief spam fighter, this week confirmed spam "leakage" from AOL's network space.

Turns out AOL wasn't blocking inbound port 25 connections to some of its networks, and, using some technical sleight-of-hand, spammers were able to blast out spam with AOL addresses. A fix is on the way, according to Hutzler.

Posted by brian at February 1, 2005 10:27 AM