Wednesday, December 27, 2000

Re: The risk of a seldom-used URL syntax (Warnock, RISKS-21.16) This is not new. Spammers have been using these tactics (both @ in the domain name, and decimal and octal IP numbers in place of DNS names) to obscure the actual site hosting their spam content for at least a year. It's annoying, because it takes extra effort to parse out the true host of the web site being spammed. Conversely, its convenient, because it provides incontrovertable evidence that the post in question is a spam, because there is no valid reason to obscure an URL in this way other than to hide the guilty. Crispin Cowan, Ph.D., Chief Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com Free Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org [Crispin Cowan via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 18] 0:00 # G!