Tag: Business

Dear members,

Please read this and consider taking action if possible against this fraudulent business, here is what happened to me:

To consider: I have been in the hosting industry for a little over 9 years now, during which I have had problems with bad clients, where they get blacklisted IP addresses for a number of reasons, these reasons can be anything from hacking, phishing, spamming or anything else that you might consider outside the bounds of legitimate online behavior.

I have dealt with organizations such as Spamhaus, Sorbs, Barracuda and many others but today I had to do business with this new (for profit) business www. spfbl.com.
Normally, if an IP address is blacklisted, the companies mentioned above (with the exception of spfbl.com) have automated means, where you can delete an IP address if the old customer has disappeared from your network, or if you terminated the client, etc.

The first thing to understand is that we do not rent IP addresses to an ISP, we have our own IP addresses from RIRS (lacnic, blackberries, etc.)

So today I have a client who rents a very basic VPS server, with an IP previously abused by another user, the new client notices the problem and lets us know, so we want to take some immediate action. One of the most frustrating mornings so far to try to solve this problem.

I sent an email to the company (they are in Brazil, their English is not the best). No answer.
Their site has a WhatsApp number for contact, I thought it was cool so I contacted them.

The guy comes to chat, asks me what the problem is, I explain to him what I said before: the old customer has listed the IP, the new customer has got the IP, I have to write it off.
what happened then was a little crazy.

1. They MANDATE that in order for an IP to be deleted, there must be an MTA behind the IP. Then they WILL REFUSE to remove it if you are the ISP OWNER of the IP. Yes, you read that right, if you are the OWNER of the IP, they will do nothing to remove it. The only way to delete an IP address is to be able to contact the person who manages the MTA on this IP (my client) and the MTA must comply with RFC 5321 (…).

2. If there is no MTA behind the listed IP, they simply REFUSE to delete it, even if there are no clients on that IP. They claim that because you don't have a user on this IP address, it won't hurt your business. I then asked the guy, if I wanted to protect the reputation of my network, what could I do, all he said was this: if there isn’t of MTA on the IP, there is no way to remove the IP. End of story.

3. We asked for feedback loops: according to him, as ISP, we have to send an email with all our prefixes, to his personal email: leandro@spfbl.net so that the case can be "studied" "and then when they want, come back to you, to tell you if they can set up a feedback loop for you.

4 No classification system. When I asked this guy about a listed IP, but the client was already terminated, with no MTA used on that IP, and about the process involved in cleaning up the reputation of the IP, he replied : This IP was not listed by reputation status. Its reputation is neutral on the SPFBL P2P network. Its only reported as 127.0.0.4.
However, this is ********, the IP address listed on their SBL, and of course will cause problems for customers everywhere.

Now this company, which hasn't even finished its website, has mixed Portuguese and English, a technical representative who has no idea what a mirror is, their reckless methods of listing IP addresses, their reluctance to admit that we are the owners of the IP address when the radiation request is made, among many others, will certainly take place, is a good reason to flush their unnecessary SBL from all the servers you manage.

Their management email address is admin@spfbl.net, I suggest contacting them about this practice.
I understand, everyone wants to make money, but to keep your network / reputation held hostage by people who really don't know what they are doing, that is not the way to do it .

Best regards,

Ezequiel