Last week saw one of the largest spam attacks ever to be launched from a single IP address. Be aware, if you have had an email from somebody called Katty Blackyard from a very interesting email address: katty@ds4ns1ns2.cn you have been spammed! Do not answer it nor open it. The IP address that this user is using is: 89.28.14.35 and it comes from Moldova, part of former Russian empire (long time ago!). The message comes in various forms, last week it might have come to your email boxes as:
Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue, so thanks for posting
This week, it might have been:
Hi, interest post. I’ll write you later about few questions!
There are few more names associated with this IP address, some of them beeing JaneRadriges, KoLoBoToNoK, BritneyLohhans, AndrewBoldman, Kelly Brown, FinalosFalosus, HrymonHyrnos, SaaiskeftRet, PiaasikHuisaka, JanHusyanB, HertyPolske, NilsVartkols, UngartBaslow, HenryFertront, ChuchBerwons, KrisBelews, HilsonBendt, CreditCardsOffers, PivoLiub and (latest one) Dmitri Gromov. Let me know if you find any more:)
The domain that is listed in the email as “ds4ns1ns2.cn” does not actually belong to the IP address listed, it has been faked. Nearly all spam contains from-addresses that are either made up completely or else stolen from strangers. You can read about this here on the SpamCop Wiki.
Fortunatelly, there is nothing malicious in the email that can harm your computer, just delete the email and it should sort you out. This kind of email was sent to simply bring the internet down, or at least to slow it down as much as possible. If you get this email as a comment on your website, please do not publish or approve this comment as this might identify you as a future target for more spam attacks.
What to do about it: There are some basic things you can do to reduce the amount of spam on the internet… When you get a message that is a petition with ‘millions/thousands have signed it, please help us to free somebody/find somebody etc’, in 99.9% of cases it is a spam. A message written by a somabody who was paid to increase the amount of traffic to a certain website or simply to increase the amount of traffic on the internet would look most possibly like that. A message that ‘you need to forward to 10 of your friends or else…’ Do you really think that a computer will send you a misfortune?!? All those are spam messages that are malicious and threten to bring the Internet down. A simple step that anybody can do is not to respond to those kind of messages and not to forward email to hundreds of their friends.
What if the email is genuine, you ask? If you think that it is genuine, you can always check. Go to google, yahoo, aol, whatever you use to surf the net and search for the event described in your email. Or a message that you “need to forward” to hundreds of your friends. Most of the times, if it is a spam, the search engine will find a blog that will define it as a spam.
If you do have any issues, contact your websmater, ISP provider or do search on the various forums.
Categories: Articles, Business, Maja Williams, News
Maja Williams has written 12 articles.
Other articles by this author Maja Williams
Great and timely post – I approved “AndrewBoldman” last week and just got the one from “Katty Blackyard” today. Thankfully, I googled her name and found your post – It seems like anytime a generic response is given to a specific topic – it is just plain spam – Anyway I went back and unapproved, marked as spam, and deleted Andrew Boldman but it’s probably too late. Thanks again for taking the time to alert folks to what to look for from potential spammers.
I had one came through to my site. A bit suspicious about it. Thanks for your very useful info. Great work.
Rinko Buu
just got a comment on my blog from katty blackyard last night and one from Gary k Patton this morning. thanks for the warning.
i got one today from a garykpatton… the same domain and IP as listed above. if they cannot gain access to my wordpress account or to my domain or gain any personal information I dont see how it does much harm… i mean bring the internet down!? how would that work?
Hello guys, thanks for all your comments. Last comment was more of a question, i guess. You ask how can harmless email bring the internet down? Well, to put it in simple terms it’s all about the amount of traffic that goes on. There are only so many cables that the signals can use to travel around our globe ad between the computers. And there are only so many signals that can go through a cable at any one time. Try and compare the internet to a roads infrastructure. There are only so many cars that can fit on a road at any one time. Imagine now if everybody with a vehicle comes out and starts driving. There would be a chaos! (Hold on, that is London early in the morning!) No, on a serious note, if everybody starts sending billions of emails and people are accepting them (which means more traffic as the signals are often sent back to the sender to say that the message has been approved), this could rediculously slow down the internet. There were already few instances of this ‘Internet Comngestion’ happening over the past few years (or decades), this is a first one I came accross when doing a search on Google: http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9809/11/internet.congestion/
There are various bodies and software applications that are installed on the web servers that monitor traffic and perform congestion maintenance, see http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/03/13/analysts_predict_internet_congestion/ and tere have been many articles and white papers written about it, see http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/cm/
I hope this helps:)
Hello Destini Khan,
You can reference this website, as long as you don’t use the reference to offend anybody nor make any false claims. Thank you very much for asking, not many people do these days.
I have had a look at your website at http://www.cardiganidiosyncraticreflection.ihouse.sg and the stories sound very nice, perfect for reading to children during these cold evenings…