Category Archives: Performance

John Quarterman on Mapping Spam and Politics (audio)

At a meeting on a completely different subject, I was interviewed about SpamRankings.net. Here's the audio, and here's the blurb they supplied:

John S. Quarterman, long time Internet denizen, wrote one of the seminal books about networking prior to the commercialization of the Internet. He co-founded the first Internet consulting firm in Texas (TIC) in 1986, and co-founded one of the first ISPs in Austin (Zilker Internet Park, since sold to Jump Point). He was a founder of TISPA, the Texas ISP Association. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.

Quarterman took some time during Georgia River Network's Weekend for Rivers to speak with the Nonprofit Snapshot about spam-mapping and small town politics.

More about Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-prize-winning work on organizing the commons, and how that applies to SpamRankings.net.

The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:

WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.

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What other ASNs were affected by botnet Ogee in February 2012?

Previously we determined that nine ASNs that showed spam surges in the U.S. and Canadian top 10 SpamRankings.net for February 2012 were infested by the botnet Ogee and that spam came from that botnet. What other ASNs were affected by Ogee in the same time period?

Let’s look at the top 10 ASNs infested by Ogee according to spam volume for 1 Feb 2012 to 12 Mar 2012:


Left Axis: Total Ogee volume (spam messages);
Right Axis: top 10 Ogee ASN volume (dotted curves)

It looks like Ogee is a new botnet, since all these top 10 ASNs came up from zero volume before 18 February 2012. The biggest initial peak in this graph is from AS 21788 NOC, #1 in the U.S. February top 10, and the biggest late surge is from AS 10439 CARINET, #8 in that same ranking. Right below CARINET is AS 32613 IWEB-AS, Canadian February #1. The rest of the 8 Ogee-infested from the U.S. top 10 previously described also are in there, except AS 7796 ATMLINK and AS 13768 PEER1.

New here are these three: Continue reading →

Big U.S. Spam Spike in February 2012 SpamRankings.net

What could push the U.S. from 13 to 2 in worldwide SpamRankings.net, and way up to number one for the last week of February 2012?

In the U.S. rankings by ASN, seven out of ten are new, and NOC number 1 came up from number 9. Something pretty bad is going on. So bad Comcast didn’t place in the top 10 at all, for the first time in recent memory!

NOC has had this problem before, in July and November 2011, but never with this amount of spam volume. And this time many other ASNs show the same pattern.

The same issue may be in the Canadian rankings as well: AS 32613 IWEB-AS jumped from 8 to 1 for the month, with almost all the increase in the same last week of the month as for the U.S. problem ASNs.

There was even a similar curve in the World rankings, for Telefonica del Peru’s AS 6147 SAA.

Our next step is to drill down to see if these ASNs were infected by the same botnet. We did that for the medical ASNs last month, but this is a much bigger spam event this month.

-jsq

Coal company reputation

Good news from the SEC for a change! They’re requiring coal plant operators to report health and safety violations, including fatalities, within a few days of occurence.

FuelFix posted from AP on 23 December 2011, SEC requiring coal firms to report safety problems

Earlier this week, the SEC announced new rules that require mining companies to start reporting any fatalities and all major health and safety violations, mine by mine, in their quarterly and annual financial reports. The filings are mandated in the wide-ranging Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed to try to increase corporate accountability.

The rules take effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. They require companies to report within four days any “significant and substantial” violations, citations, flagrant violations and imminent-danger orders issued by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Coal operators must also include the dollar value of proposed fines, whether the company has been or may be designated a pattern violator by MSHA, and any pending cases with the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.

What problem does this reporting solve? As the article points out: Continue reading →

Daniel Karrenberg and RIPE Atlas

Daniel Karrenberg shows an animation related to RIPE Atlas, RIPE’s new active measurement project using USB-powered dongles scattered around the Internet.

Video by jsq at RIPE 61 in Rome, Italy, 15 Nov 2010. His slides, the RIPE Atlas home page, and the conference will put up video of all the talks within about a day.

-jsq

PS: My talk is 11AM Rome time tomorrow, Tuesday 16 Nov.

Outbound Spam Ranking Experiments

Should Uganda Telecom be counted as a Belgian ISP for outbound spam rankings?

Which matters most: history, topology, business headquarters location, or some other criterion?

These are some questions that come up in designing experiments in rolling out a reputation system for outbound spam. More on this in the RIPE Labs article (8 Nov 2010), Internet Reputation Experiments for Better Security.

Such experiments can draw on fifty years of social science research and literature, first crystalized as Social Comparison Theory by Leon Festinger in 1954, that indicate that making personal reputation transparent changes personal behavior. More recent research indicates that the same applies to organizations. Using anti-spam blocklist data, it is possible to make E-Mail Service Provider (ESP) behavior (banks, stores, universities, etc., not just ISPs) in preventing or stopping outbound spam transparent, and this paper is about experiments to see how the resulting reputation actually changes ESP behavior.

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Quis custodiet ipsos medici?

Internet security is in a position similar to that of safety in the medical industry. Many doctors have an opinion like this one, quoted by Kent Bottles:
“Only 33% of my patients with diabetes have glycated hemoglobin levels that are at goal. Only 44% have cholesterol levels at goal. A measly 26% have blood pressure at goal. All my grades are well below my institution’s targets.” And she says, “I don’t even bother checking the results anymore. I just quietly push the reports under my pile of unread journals, phone messages, insurance forms, and prior authorizations.”

Meanwhile, according to the CDC, 99,000 people die in the U.S. per year because of health-care associated infections. That is equivalent of an airliner crash every day. It’s three times the rate of deaths by automobile accidents.

The basic medical error problems observed by Dennis Quaid when his twin babies almost died due to repeated massive medically-administered overdoses and due to software problems such as ably analysed by Nancy Leveson for the infamous 1980s Therac-25 cancer-radiation device are not in any way unique to computing in medicine. The solutions to those problems are analogous to some of the solutions IT security needs: measurements plus six or seven layers of aggregation, analysis, and distribution.

As Gardiner Harris reported in the New York Times, August 20, 2010, another problem is that intravenous and feeding tubes are not distinguished by shape or color: Continue reading →

Fraud: Fake Zep Tickets on Ebay

ledzeppelin003.jpg Now this is chutzpah:
Although our reporter was not the winning bidder, the seller contacted us and claimed the winner had failed to pay. She then quoted a price of £2,400 and said she would post the tickets to our reporter.

But we had already contacted the winning bidder via Ebay; he told us that he had already transferred £2,414 to the seller’s bank account.

— Fraudsters hijack Led Zeppelin concert, Promotor blames Ebay for failing to take down auctions for non-existent tickets,Dinah Greek, Computeract!ve, 30 Oct 2007

Not only are these invalid tickets, but the seller was selling them twice!

-jsq

Linus on Schedulers vs. Security as Numbers vs. Opinions

linus_torvalds.jpg Thus Spake Linus:

Schedulers can be objectively tested. There’s this thing called "performance", that can generally be quantified on a load basis.

Yes, you can have crazy ideas in both schedulers and security. Yes, you can simplify both for a particular load. Yes, you can make mistakes in both. But the *discussion* on security seems to never get down to real numbers.

So the difference between them is simple: one is "hard science". The other one is "people wanking around with their opinions".

— Re: [PATCH] Version 3 (2.6.23-rc8) Smack: Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel, by Linus Torvalds, kerneltrap.org, Monday, October 1, 2007 – 7:04 am

Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux and thus originator of its associated industry, continues:

Continue reading →

Third-Party Measurement

Apdex It seems it’s not enough to just believe what ISPs tell you about bandwidth use:

NetForecast has been running live measurements of the ten Apdex Alliance Contributing Members.  The results from five different locations across the US show a great range of performance as seen by the users.  The measurement data is then summarized using both typical averaging methods and the Apdex method.  The results are documented in "Averages Hide the Real End-User Experience: Apdex Tells the Full Story," NFR 5086 by Peter Sevcik, April 2007.

The Apdex reports of the very same measurement data uncover many more performance issues.  For example, it finds a region where the users see chronic poor performance that was completely hidden by the averaging methods.  The ten weeks of data show that averages significantly under reported true end-user performance issues. It makes a clear case for reporting your measurements with Apdex!

The ISPs may not know where the users see chronic poor performance, either. Do they know how to ask the users? Do they know what to compare to in other ISPs?

Continue reading →