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Search words: NTT, communications,spammers,abuse,harvesting
During the last months I have noticed that one IP number in particular is trying to harvest the Finlander site, being online getting error messages almost around the clock. Every day the same IP number 128.241.20.205 belonging to a several IP number cluster 128.241.20.196 - 128.241.20.207 where all machines seem to have the same function, ie. harvesting! All machines are equally equipped Linux boxes - you can browse them if you like.
I have notified the NTT Communication company about the abuse and showed them that these IP numbers do the same trick all over the world. Try to google one of the IP numbers yourself and you will see them as really frequent "visitors" all over the word. They often attack bulletin boards and forums, scanning for email addresses and probably also look for open security holes in the forum software. - They of course cannot harvest email addresses from Finlander membership lists since only members can see these lists. But they try even though the robot.txt even specifically disallows this!
Of course there will always be people and companies that try to use information in illegal or an nearly illegal way - but the thing that makes me tick is that companies like NTT still host these clusters of machines even though they get reports about the abuse, reports of this kind of companies that do nothing else than support actions against the proper netiquette. These machines among other things do not apply to the robots.txt directives which specify which pages whould be indexed by indexing bots and which not.
Upon my complaints the abuse(at)ntt.net replies
NTT should check their customers a little better so that they don't harbor questionable companies. Of course I gave them a hint that the only thing they needed to do is to monitor the traffic from the customers IP-cluster and do some easy googling to verify my report of abuse. It is not we who should have to convince NTT that their customers are on the edge of illegality. That is their job if they don't want to get negative publicity!
During the last months I have noticed that one IP number in particular is trying to harvest the Finlander site, being online getting error messages almost around the clock. Every day the same IP number 128.241.20.205 belonging to a several IP number cluster 128.241.20.196 - 128.241.20.207 where all machines seem to have the same function, ie. harvesting! All machines are equally equipped Linux boxes - you can browse them if you like.
I have notified the NTT Communication company about the abuse and showed them that these IP numbers do the same trick all over the world. Try to google one of the IP numbers yourself and you will see them as really frequent "visitors" all over the word. They often attack bulletin boards and forums, scanning for email addresses and probably also look for open security holes in the forum software. - They of course cannot harvest email addresses from Finlander membership lists since only members can see these lists. But they try even though the robot.txt even specifically disallows this!
Of course there will always be people and companies that try to use information in illegal or an nearly illegal way - but the thing that makes me tick is that companies like NTT still host these clusters of machines even though they get reports about the abuse, reports of this kind of companies that do nothing else than support actions against the proper netiquette. These machines among other things do not apply to the robots.txt directives which specify which pages whould be indexed by indexing bots and which not.
Upon my complaints the abuse(at)ntt.net replies
we cannot complete our investigation because your complaint does not contain logs showing the offending traffic
