Archive for the 'technology' Category
Well, if you have read the previous post of Reverse DNS Issue, you will realize that computers which have been compromised by viruses and trojan horses have kind of been weeded out of the email spamming industry.
You would have think that we have finally won the war over the hackers and spammers. Truth be told… that was only the beginning…. As hackers found that compromised drones with dynamic IP addresses were no longer effective in their email spamming efforts, they turned their attention to …
servers with static IPs.
The Origin
A couple of years ago, it did not really mattered how DNS was configured. Mails just went through. 
Those were the easy days… before SPAM came into the whole.
What happened was that some brilliant hacker discovered that sending unsolicited emails pushing drugs like Viagra, Enlargement drugs, etc… was very profitable business even if the response rate was dismal. They worked by the laws of large numbers…. Spammers understood that even with very low response rates, they just need to send larger and larger quantities of emails to generate the necessary responses and $$$.
Soon, hackers began running their home office like data centers. They have several computers with a high bandwidth. These computers served only one person – to dish out emails at an ever more ferocious rate….
However that was not fast enough yet. The numbers had to get larger… and that is when they decided to leverage on the resources of computers not belong to them. Trojan horses and viruses started to come into the picture… these viruses upon inflicting hapless computers will render these computers at the will of the spammer… to send emails! In fact, one prominent hacker at a time had over half a million drones at his control. By issuing a few simple commands, he could totally flood the network of his victims. This flooding of a victim’s network became known as a Denial-of-Service attack.
Most of the time though, the hacker will use these drones as a way to dispatch more emails to anonymous strangers. That prompted ISPs to look into using reverse DNS to authenticate the origin of emails….
Did u know that you could send off emails directly from your Windows Command Prompt without any email clients like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express?
Well, the email clients do not have any additional functionality other than providing a nice user interface to a backend smtp server. Accessing your emails involve a 2 part process:
- Identifying the SMTP server
- Sending email through the SMTP server