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Home > Cloud computing News > Amazon EC2 email blocked by antispam group Spamhaus |
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Spamhaus requires that the owners of any listed IP addresses personally contact the organization and justify why they should be delisted. "Our policy for delisting is that the spam has to stop," said an email from Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox, "and our editors must be convinced it is unlikely to restart when the listing is removed." He explained that the offender, a 'warez' spammer who was sending viruses, phishing attacks and spam advertising, appeared to be using any number of IP addresses from EC2 locations within the United States, so Spamhaus had no choice to list the entire address block as a culprit.
"This problem seems to be caused by one single abuser, who may well have found an exploit giving him or her access to resources in the cloud," said Cox. The exploit appeared to range widely across various subnets in EC2. Until he could be sure that the exploit or originator of the traffic had been identified and quashed, he couldn't remove the blacklisting. In the mean time, EC2 users are getting increasingly irritated with the widespread failure of email delivery from applications and servers hosted with AWS. An AWS forum member affected by the blacklisting responded to a suggestion that he use a third-party SMTP relay with ire. " 'Amazon does not get involved...you'll have to find a workaround' -- that's unacceptable," he wrote. "This is affecting ALL EC2 customers sending mail. Get off your high horse and work with Spamhaus on this." An Amazon support representative said, in reply, that they were working with Spamhaus as fast as possible to resolve the malicious traffic. "We are treating this with high priority," he said. UPDATE: Spamhaus has moved the U.S. EC2 IP block to its Policy Block List (PBL), a weaker form of blacklist that may allow EC2 users to send and receive legitimate traffic. Spamhaus says that it still cannot permit individuals to appeal the ban but the change should help. IP addresses listed in the PBL are listed as conditional spam-origination points, unlike the original SBL. Spamhaus said the change will allow email operators to send authenticated mail traffic to outside mail servers and allow emails to link back to sites with EC2, both of which the SBL blacklisted. This may allow EC2 users to easily redirect mail to servers outside EC2 and let them continue to use mail-driven applications from within EC2. Spamhaus said that PBL listing can normally be appealed by individuals within EC2 but, in this case, they couldn't allow that as the spammers might slip through. "Unlike Amazon, we do not know who is a legitimate customer with a long-existing mail server and who is not," said a statement on their Web site. For its part, Amazon has stated that they are trying to resolve the issue as fast as possible with Spamhaus. The modification of the block is an indication that there has been at least some degree of understanding reached. "We investigate and respond aggressively to all complaints of spam coming from the [EC2] service. We are working with Spamhaus to understand why they took this measure and prevent this issue from affecting our users in the future," said Amazon spokesperson Kay Kinton in an email. Carl Brooks is the Technology Writer at SearchCloudComputing.com. Contact him at cbrooks@techtarget.com.
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