Re:It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name
by walrus01 on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @10:24PM
(#21644984)
That specific paragraph is a lot of weirdness.
But once you have the domain, somebody who knows what they're doing with DNS and SMTP absolutely could set up proper email services on it (forward-confirmed rDNS, SPF, DKIM signing, DMARC), and send spam with it. It's functionally equivalent to any other domain. Particularly if the intention was to be a one-shot approach that would "burn" both the domain and the hosting services, such as in the days leading up to an election.
A really smart bad actor would use some IP space from an ISP that traditionally has not been a source of spam. Eg: Not an ISP with a lot of low-dollar-value VPS/VM/hosting customers.
There's still some totally "clean" /24 IP blocks out there in the various RBLs and spam listing services if you go searching.
If I were an evil person and did this, I'd try to get the domain at least a few weeks in advance and try to generate a moderate volume of totally legit looking emails, destined for the top 20 major destinations (office365, gmail, etc) and verify from a bunch of sockpuppet accounts that the mail was actually getting delivered. Then I'd turn loose the fire hose.
Should a person want to be really evil, they'd do something like the reverse of what happened to the City of Baltimore with the cryptolocker trojan. Find a list of municipal (water, sewer, gas, electrical, property tax) bill payers and email each of them a plausible looking invoice, with cryptolocker attached. The likelihood of people opening it would be high.
But once you have the domain, somebody who knows what they're doing with DNS and SMTP absolutely could set up proper email services on it (forward-confirmed rDNS, SPF, DKIM signing, DMARC), and send spam with it. It's functionally equivalent to any other domain. Particularly if the intention was to be a one-shot approach that would "burn" both the domain and the hosting services, such as in the days leading up to an election.
A really smart bad actor would use some IP space from an ISP that traditionally has not been a source of spam. Eg: Not an ISP with a lot of low-dollar-value VPS/VM/hosting customers.
There's still some totally "clean" /24 IP blocks out there in the various RBLs and spam listing services if you go searching.
If I were an evil person and did this, I'd try to get the domain at least a few weeks in advance and try to generate a moderate volume of totally legit looking emails, destined for the top 20 major destinations (office365, gmail, etc) and verify from a bunch of sockpuppet accounts that the mail was actually getting delivered. Then I'd turn loose the fire hose.
Should a person want to be really evil, they'd do something like the reverse of what happened to the City of Baltimore with the cryptolocker trojan. Find a list of municipal (water, sewer, gas, electrical, property tax) bill payers and email each of them a plausible looking invoice, with cryptolocker attached. The likelihood of people opening it would be high.