Re: <nettime> Wikileaks and spam

[Nicholas Knouf <nak44@cornell.edu>]

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On 12/12/2010 10:31 PM, Joly MacFie wrote:
> That IP address is, indeed, on the Spamhaus block list, but it isn't because
> of Wikileaks -- it is because the address is in an IP address range
> belonging to a Russian ISP that is part of an alleged criminal enterprise
> specializing in distribution of spam, botnets, phising, and malware.   The
> machines in that range do distribute spam and bad software.  Whether or not
> there is really a wikileaks mirror there or not is not something I do not
> intend to check -- even if there is a mirror, there is a good possibility
> the documents have been seeded with malware.

- From the wikileaks.info about page:

"This site is not affiliated with Wikileaks. It is hosted on a different
server, uses different DNS servers, a different registrar and has a
different owner. So if Wikileaks is not reachable any more (due to
technical or due to legal reasons), you can try different links from
this site. "

It would appear to be a solidarity site that simply hosts the IP
addresses of different "official" wikileaks sites.

And it would be hard for the documents to be seeded with malware; all of
the Cablegate mirrors are serving straight HTML---no PDFs, no DOCs, etc.
 Only a single archive file with torrents of their earlier releases.
Different unscrupulous mirror providers could do something malicious
with the files once they are uploaded to their server, but this is
nothing different than connecting to any other server on the internet.
This sounds similar to the "OMG the CIA setup a honey-pot wikileaks
mirror" brouhaha that was the result of---willful or
not---misinformation; see
http://breakingthecalm.blogspot.com/2010/12/musing-on-misinformation-morons.html
.

Anyone hosting a WikiLeaks mirror on a home cable or DSL connection will
also probably come from an IP within a spam blocklist because so much
spam comes from compromised home machines.

nick
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