The Spamhaus Project, the powerful and important organisation that tracks the internet's spam operations and sources, appears to have become too big for its boots.
This week the organisation has been accused of extortion over a denial-of-service (DOS) attack on the Dutch A2B Internet which in turn has now accused Spamhaus of criminal acts with the Dutch police being called in to investigate its actions.
The organisation has gone too far Erik Bais, director of A2B Internet told the Dutch Webwerld. While he commends the work Spamhaus does, Bais feels they themselves have committed criminal acts, which A2B Internet and its customers have become the victim of.
It started with the recent request of Spamhaus to A2B Internet to block all traffic from the German internet service provider Cyberbunker, also known as CB3ROB, the Webwerld report noted. Cyberbunker is known for hosting sites that find it difficult to be hosted elsewhere, such as The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks. Cyber bunker/CB3ROB has a number of racks in the data centre Datahouse, that house network services at A2B Internet.
The request to block traffic was, however, based on a text message to someone in the United States according to Webwerld. Blocking the entire Cyberbunker IP address range was considered by A2B Internet to be disproportionate.
With Spamhaus placing all IP addresses for A2B Internet on a blacklist, the so-called SBL (Spamhaus Blocklist) that numerous providers and mail servers use to block spam, all customers of A2B Internet were blocked, resulting in all of these companies no longer being able to send or receive email, even though they were not involved.
The move by Spamhaus, who is seemingly unaccountable, is reminiscent of a move in 2007 that saw them request the Austrian registry, nic.at, delete a number of .AT domain names that were allegedly used for phishing. However Spamhaus was unable to provide enough information to the registry and so they did not act.
Upon nic.at not acting, Spamhaus then blocked IP addresses for the .AT registry that prevented them from informing .AT registrants about changes such as if the registrant wished to change their registrar.
In this age where email services are critical, the power given to Spamhaus, a small but important organisation, needs to have checks and balances. Yet Spamhaus seems to operate without accountability and without the need to show cause of why it is taking its actions. If it does not like what someone does, it takes action regardless.
The information from the Webwerld report was based on an online translation, however the original Dutch version is available at webwereld.nl/nieuws/108204/isp-doet-aangifte-tegen-spamhaus-wegens-afpersing.html.
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