Warning about Spam-Generating IPs

02/03/2015

During its first five months of operation, the Warning Advice and Reporting Point (WARP) created by LACNIC has already managed 39 issues within the region.

According to Graciela Martinez, Head of LACNIC’s Warning Advice and Reporting Point, spam was the top concern for LACNIC’s coordination team, as in just one month 38 million unsolicited messages were sent from 1,575 IP addresses in the region.

Together with the region’s companies and organizations, LACNIC WARP facilitated handling of the 39 security incidents reported during those five months and attempted to coordinate with the affected parties in order to strengthen their response capabilities.

In addition, WARP alerted the rest of the community about the most relevant computer security threats in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Spam. Martinez noted that spam causes huge losses for the Internet, as it involves large amounts of processing energy, use of systems, and network bandwidth. As an example, she noted that 1,500 Latin American and Caribbean IPs generated 38 million spam messages in the month of December alone. “These figures are very high and quite concerning,” Martinez remarked.

Based on the information that is being gathered, LACNIC will begin to alert spam generators and issue recommendations on how to manage spam, ensuring complete confidentiality.

“This process of collecting and analyzing sensitive information serves to generate security warnings, promote the use of best practices throughout the region, and raise awareness about potential threats and solutions in case of computer security attacks,” Martinez added.

In this sense, information exchange agreements are being signed with companies and organizations in the LACNIC service region.

LACNIC WARP also managed denial of service, brute force, and phishing attacks, having achieved immediate responses for eliminating the fraudulent websites.