How a virus blackened my reputation
We all like to think of ourselves as popular, so it comes of something of a shock to find yourself on a blacklist. But that?s exactly what happened to me last week or, rather, to my public IP address which, if you rely on email, is an equally damaging slight. Moreover, it?s an illustration of the fact that no matter how well protected you think you are, network security is easily breached.
It all started when my outgoing emails started to bounce back. Not all of them, just a few (including those to IT Week), leading me to think that it was a problem with the receiving servers. But then a pattern emerged. The bounce-backs were all from servers using MessageLabs filters, telling me in no uncertain terms that I was a suspected spammer and needed to do something about it.
A quick search on www.dnsstuff.com soon revealed the cause. There was my public IP address on not just one, but five blacklists, clearly highlighted as a potential source of spam. According to the mail logs at my ISP, the messages weren?t being sent by their servers, so a mass-mailing virus on a machine somewhere on my LAN was the most likely culprit. Equipped with the latest updates I diligently checked all my PCs and servers for viruses. I even checked machines running Linux, but all came up clean. Yet I was still being blacklisted.
