| Advisory #2517 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Fri, Apr 24 2009 11:07 am by support@aussiehq.com.au |
| As many of you know, spammers will often try different tactics to get around spam prevention methods put in place by ISPs and web service providers. Spammers will often compromise an account running outdated customer supplied software for the sole purpose of using that account to spam. Up until recently, spammers have used the local mail server to send spam. This means that our own systems would pick up an anomaly and we would be able to stop the spam and suspend the account in question (pending customer resolution of the problem). The latest tactic being employed by spammers is to run a local SMTP MTA (mail transfer agent) and send the spam directly to the remote domain. This means that the spammer is able to bypass local protection and send their spam. To combat this situation we are currently rolling out SMTP filters. These filters will prevent any mail being sent from our shared hosting network unless that mail is sent through the local SMTP daemon ('localhost'). If you have a shared hosting account and are running scripts that are sending mail to servers other than the local machine, you must immediately change your script to use 'localhost' as the SMTP server. If you are using local mail (including the PHP 'mail' function, or by setting the mail server in your script to 'localhost'), you will not be affected by these changes. If you have any questions regarding these changes, please contact our customer service team. |
