Blog for Antispam and Content Filtering Observations

"Country-Of-Origin" eMail Filter Could Have Eased Cyber Attack

According to news reports, the world has entered into a totally new realm with the possibility of the first state sponsored cyber war. Estonia has accused Russia of waging Denial-of-Service and spam attacks on Estonian computers.

• “Estonia hit by 'Moscow cyber war” -- BBC
  
• “Russia accused of unleashing cyber war to disable Estonia” -- Guardian UK
  
• “Estonia recovers from massive DDoS attack” -- ComputerWorld

According to these articles, initially Russian computers were the point of origin but have since spread to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Vietnam and others.

• “Our mail server was absolutely inundated with spam e-mails as well" -- Aet Suvari, Estonian journalist.

• "The largest part of these attacks are coming from Russia and from official servers of the authorities of Russia" -- Urmas Paet, the Estonian Foreign Minister.

• “However, analysis of the malicious traffic shows that computers from the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Vietnam and others have been used in the attacks” -- Hillar Aarelaid, chief security officer for Estonia's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).

“Country-of-Origin” email filtering could have been used to ease the severity of these cyber attacks by instantly reducing the spam email portions of the assault. The flood of malicious email could have been blocked before ever reaching the Estonian servers.

Even without coordinated attacks, the Russian Federation is consistently among the top spam originating countries in the world. If you don't do business there, why receive email that originates there?


AAS

XE-Filter - Filtering Spam eMail by Its Country-of-Origin

posted by CMS Blog Master @ 10:17 AM