peter_hansteen

Norway is digital to a fault. That is why attempting to buy the ticket for a bus ride can reveal a cascade of user experience (UX) failures.

With the imaginary friends, also known as spamtraps, now more numerous than the inhabitants of their virtual landlord's home country, a greytrapping retrospective is in order.

OpenBSD as your daily driver, tips to keep you system in trim, updated for the upcoming OpenBSD 7.7 release, expected around May 1st, 2025.

Already somewhat blasé from life in the honeypots, yours truly registers an even more bizarre level of events after a some routine logs spelunking

A light analysis of attack data. Also available with nicer formatting but trackers at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/fun_facts_about_the_april_2024_ci...

This reminds me of my own screed of a much simpler document (an ASCII table generated as a printer test back in the late 1980s) that was not possible to render correctly some years later - https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2013/11/compatibility-is-hard-cha... - also contains a link to a further rant about other document formats that were supposed to be "standard" and "portable".

Making life harder for spammers does not necessarily require a lot of effort, if done correctly. Here are a few suggestions for how to use your spamd(8) on an OpenBSD or FreeBSD system that require minimal input but can yield noticeable gains.

Doing your bit to protect your own users and others agains scams, phising or other undesirable mail activity is good netizenship, but unfortunately there is a tendency to think that contributing in any way takes a lot of effort in addition to deep insight into all matters technical and social.

This piece is intended to give you, an aspiring or experienced OpenBSD or FreeBSD user who do not necessarily run a mails service yourself, a taste of some of the options available to you even if you do not want to expend too much effort.

If you want to hurt spammers, you can get away with maintaining a list of domains you want to receive mail for in your spamd.alloweddomains.

That particular problem has been addressed in the more common architectures - syspatch was introduced in OpenBSD 6.1 (April 2017) https://man.openbsd.org/syspatch

For those looking for nicer formatting, the article is also available as a three part APNIC guest blog post https://blog.apnic.net/2021/10/28/openbsd-part-1-how-it-all-... (links to the other two articles should be very easy to find from there) or the original blogspot version https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2021/09/what-every-it-person-need... (and yes, the article was originally published in September 2021).

The nxdomain.no version is tracker-free other than my rather short lived nginx log.

or with trackers https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-despicable-no-good-bl... #wankstortion #extortion #sextortion #cybercrime #blackmail #OpenBSD #spamd #onlinescams #greytrapping #fraud #spamtraps #spam #bitcoin My last ever piece about this silliness, I sincerely hope.

A question on IRC I had to answer. Also with nicer formatting but trackers https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/12/can-your-spam-eater-manag... #openbsd #spamd #measuring #metrics #effectiveness #greylisting #greytrapping,

also available with nicer formatting as https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/12/that-grumpy-bsd-guy-harve...

The "Sextortion" spam is in technical terms mind-numbingly boring, following the same patterns as other spam to a fault, distinguishing itself only in the embarrasment approach to extortion.

Interestingly, this piece seems to be bot-labeled as "porn" for some DNS based blocklists, so the author has made the text available here too: https://nxdomain.no/~peter/the_numbers_show_we_have_a_failur...

The probable reason is that somebody did not like my reporting on the fairly obvious "sextortion" scams, in this piece https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-sextortion-scams-numb... which is also available as https://nxdomain.no/~peter/the_numbers_show_we_have_a_failur....

Enjoy! And I still refuse to believe anybody would actually be sexually aroused by any of my published writing.

Yes, some idiot keeps adding the "porn" tag to the site for some reason.

Anyway, the article in question is also available, trackerless and with "classic" formatting at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/better_off_with_pf.html - normally my WIP to show early reviewers spot.

From the most recent SEMIBUG meeting, slides at https://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf_favorite/, trackerless full text https://nxdomain.no/~peter/better_off_with_pf.html

Also without trackers but with only 'classic' formatting at https://nxdomain.no/~peter/forgotten_blockchain_account_scam...

It finally happened. Today, I added the three hundred thousandth (yes, 300,000th) spamtrap address to my greytrapping setup, for the most part fished out of incoming traffic here, for spammers to consume.

More likely than not, you will be up and running inside of minutes.

My most recent laptop upgrade ran like this: http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2017/07/openbsd-and-modern-laptop....