[CentOS] pop3 attack

Wed Dec 10 17:16:58 UTC 2008
Bill Campbell <centos at celestial.com>

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008, James Pifer wrote:
>On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 16:26 -0500, James Pifer wrote:
>> Thanks to all. For now I've stopped it using iptables. I tried stopping
>> it at my router without success, yet another reason to replace it! I
>> will also report it to abuse at covad.net. 
>> 
>
>My issues have gotten worse. Apparently over the last few days my ip
>address has gotten blacklisted. No idea why. Even though I have a
>commercial class cable modem service, my ip is residential because it
>comes to my house. But I've been running my mail server for several
>years and never had an issue. 

Your IP address, 70.62.90.185, is listed on zen.spamhaus.org, and
you can probably go to their web site to see why it's listed.

I have see quite a few cases where spam is sent from webmail
accounts (mostly squirrelmail) by crackers who get access via
weak passwords found by imap/pop probes as you described.

It's been my experience in the 15 years we have been doing
support for regional ISPs that well over 50% of their user's
passwords are easily cracked, and that getting the users to use
good passwords is difficult to say the least.

Bill
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