Tag Archives: Medical

#1 third time: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, July 2013

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center‘s AS122 U-PGH-NET-AS is #1 again in the July 2013 worldwide medical SpamRankings.net from CBL volume data.

July 2013 line chart

It’s also been #1 in June 2013, when it also spiked over 1,000, Continue reading

Medical churn in December 2012 SpamRankings.net

Good (Konkuk), improving (Cornell), and bad (eHealth) in the December 2012 country medical SpamRankings.net.

First the good news: Konkuk University Hospital went from 297 spam messages last month to zero in December 2012, removing Korea Korea from the country medical rankings. Children’s Hospital & Health System and THE GOOD SAMARITAN HOSPITAL OF LEBANON PENNSYLVANIA also went to zero, and Yale-New Haven Health Services Corporation and Sutter Health dropped enough to fall out of the world top 10 medical ASNs emitting spam in SpamRankings.net.

Now the apparently bad news that turned good. Continue reading

Festi botnet in July 2012 U.S. Medical SpamRankings.net from CBL

AS 122 U-PGH-NET-AS The curve that took University of Pittsburgh Medical Center‘s AS 122 U-PGH-NET-AS to number one in the July 2012 U.S. SpamRankings.net from CBL data is almost completely explained by Festi botnet, except for one day, plus the small curve at the beginning of the month was apparently caused by Grum botnet.

AS 17311 ECMC-BGP was infested with Festi (blue curve on the right) at the same time as AS 122, and AS 17311 earlier had a Cutwail botnet

Continue reading

Pittsburgh back in the top 10 for spam from U.S. medical organizations

And this time it's #1 in the July 2012 U.S. SpamRankings.net from CBL data:

AS 122 U-PGH-NET-AS in the same ranking over time:

2011
Mar
Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 2012
Jan
Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul
34 32 32 8 31 8 4 29 32 33 30 32 29 6 5 9 1

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's AS 122 U-PGH-NET-AS and Erie County Medical Center's AS 17311 ECMC-BGP not only took #1 and #2, they also spammed longer than other medical ASNs. That jumped them up 8 ranks each in one month.

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WIN finally got the no medical spam memo in March 2012

There’s a new development since we summarized A Year of SpamRankings.net: Medical Organizations. Chronic spamming medical organization WIN of Belgium finally dropped out of the July 2012 top 10 with its 9208 ASN, as you can see in the chronic ranking compilation:

Date:2011
Mar
Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 2012
Jan
Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul
Volume 26,737 33,000 10,851 31,183 33,930 48,342 13,454 5,992 16,838 32,058 10,272 15,273 7,331 693 270 329 21
Rank 1 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 5 3 11

It looks like WIN finally got the memo in March 2012 and has been improving since then.

Congratulations, WIN!

WIN finally went to zero

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Microsoft back on top in June SpamRankings.net

1 (2) AS 8075 MICROSOFT-CORP—MSN-AS-BLOCK
2 (1) AS 36692 OPENDNS
3 (-) AS 26769 BANDCON
4 (-) AS 22414 CRAIGS-NET-1
5 (-) AS 22822 LLNW
6 (-) AS 10912 INTERNAP-BLK

Beating even OPENDNS, Microsoft took #1 in U.S. PSBL June 2012 rankings.

Microsoft was last on top in the same rankings for April 2012. I thought Microsoft was a leader in Internet security?

In other news, Bell Canada’s AS 577 BACOM actually dropping off the Canadian June 2012 rankings from CBL data. Shaw took #1 and Iweb dropped to #2.

We have a new medical winner! It’s Hartford Hospital’s AS 11047 HHCC-ASN1. Gaining altitude at the end of the month was Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College and Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University with AS 20252 JSIWMC.

More on those and other developments in later blog posts.

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Cleveland Clinic wins one way, then another, in SpamRankings.net

1(4)AS 22093 CCF-NETWORKUnited States US
2(-)AS 27609 USC-UNIVERSITY-HOSPITALUnited States US
3(1)AS 25611 NSLIJHSUnited States US
4(-)AS 19335 APRIA-HEALTHCAREUnited States US
5(2)AS 9208 WINBelgium BE
6(7)AS 122 U-PGH-NET-ASUnited States US
Cleveland Clinic took #1 in the May 2012 worldwide medical SpamRankings.net. So Cleveland Clinic’s AS 22093 won the worldwide medical rankings by spamming the most of any medical organization worldwide, as found in CBL blocklist data. Boo Cleveland Clinic!

Yet AS 22093 CCF-NETWORK dropped like a rock on 7 May 2012, going to zero the next day, and staying there. So Cleveland Clinic also was most improved for May 2012 medical organizations. Congratulations, Cleveland Clinic!

This feat of IT security cleanliness shouldn’t have been hard for CCF, since AS 22093 CCF-NETWORK seems to have had a Lethic problem, which CBL saw on no more than 3 hosts. Sure, there could have been more hosts infected than that, and CBL just might not have seen them all. But 3 is far smaller than what CBL sees for a typical botnet infection, so the number of infected hosts probably was quite small. Which means it should have been easy for CCF to find them all and fix them.

Hm, maybe being #4 last month gave CCF some incentive?

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Is January’s medical spam caused by botnets?

Remember those three spamming medical organizations PSBL saw and the spike from CSHS that SpamRankings.net found in CBL data? Digging into the underlying data, and graphing them all on the same chart, we see this:

Even though the three three-digit-spamming medicos spam oddly coherently, we don’t find any botnets for them. This may be because most of that spam was seen by PSBL, and our botnet assignments come from CBL. CBL didn’t see any spam from those ASNs, so it didn’t have anything to assign for botnets. Maybe they’re infested by the same botnet; maybe not; can’t tell.

But it was CBL that saw that big spam spike for AS 22328 CSHS. And CBL did assign a botnet to that: Lethic. For all but two days of CSHS spam shown, CBL assigned Lethic to the total amount of spam from CSHS for that day. That may be because all that CSHS spam is coming from a single computer.

Of course, CBL’s botnet assignments are not perfect, but infosec professionals tell me CBL is about as good as it gets for that, so there’s a good chance this botnet assignment is correct.

The good news is that all of the trio of three-digit spamming medicos decreased their spam and even went to zero during the period shown.

And CSHS spam peaked at the end of January and started back down in February.

Pretty soon there may be once again little or no spam from medical organizations to rank.

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CSHS is back in January 2012 SpamRankings.net

In SpamRankings.net, January PSBL data reveals three three-digit U.S. medical spamming organizations, plus CSHS, and CBL data confirms a big spam spike from CSHS.

The three with more than 100 spam messages for the month were

each accounting for about a third of the total spam volume seen from medical organizations by CBL in January 2012.

Cedars-Sinai Health Systems‘ AS 22328 CSHS came in only seventh in PSBL data, with only 10 spam messages. But in CBL data, CSHS came in first, with 2,873 messages. That’s not a lot, compared to, for example, Comcast, which CBL saw spamming more than two million messages during the same month. But what patients would prefer to see from medical organizations is zero spam messages, since spam is a sneeze for infosec disease, and who wants to think their hospital’s information security or radiology computers might be infected?

Chances are CSHS will notice and clean it up pretty quick. Those other three medical orgs may have some sort of more chronic problem….

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Cleveland Clinic spewing spam again

Here’s why to look at more than one spam data source: according to the PSBL volume data for November 2011, Cleveland Clinic’s AS 22093 CCF-NETWORK spewed more than a hundred spam messages a day on multiple days, while CBL volume data showed Cleveland Clinic with only 42 spam messages for the entire month. Apparently PSBL’s spamtraps happened to be in the path of this CCF spam.

Now a couple of hundred spam messages a day isn’t much by world organization standards, but compared to what we’d all like to see from medical organizations (zero), it’s a lot.

Also compared to the other medical institutions in the same rankings from the same data, the pie chart looks like Pac Man and the bar graph looks like a hockey stick.

Maybe Cleveland Clinic didn’t get the memo after all.

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