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Tell HN: Uceprotect is extorting website owners

2 points by goldenmember ↗ HN
I recently discovered by accident that our website was being blocked by Orange's security filters.

After a quick check, I found that our IP address is listed on UCEPROTECT Level 3. The listing is based on the reputation of the entire ASN 14061 (DigitalOcean, US) [1]. In other words, even if your IP did nothing wrong, it will still be listed because of its ASN.

If your site is innocent and listed only because it's hosted on DigitalOcean, UCEPROTECT offers to whitelist it for about $30/month or $108/year [2].

I checked the ASNs of several other popular hosting providers, and they're all listed too. So if your site is hosted on DigitalOcean or any other major provider, it's probably blacklisted as well. That can cut you off from customers on mobile networks like Orange, whose "cybersecurity protection" uses blacklists like UCEPROTECT to filter traffic.

Honestly, in my 20-year career, this is the first time I've seen a blacklist misbehave this badly and ask for money when there's clearly been no wrongdoing.

[1] http://www.uceprotect.net/en/rblcheck.php?asn=14061

[2] https://www.whitelisted.org/

49 comments

[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 44.0 ms ] thread
someonebaggy
All of the spam blocklists are like this.

At one time quite recently, Cloudflare was on Spamhaus's "Don't Route Or Peer" list. Imagine where the world would be if anyone gave a shit about that list.

But if an entire ISP is blocking you based on UCEPROTECT, which is designed for email spam filters - are you sure? An ISP that blocked all of DO would get so many complaints and be open to so much legal liability. Usually these are only used for email filtering.

goldenmember
I disagree. Normally you can reach out to request delisting, and it's free.

As I explained, Orange's security filter seems to automatically block requests at the DNS level if your website's domain resolves to an IP listed on UCEPROTECT Level 3. In this case, that appears to be the entire DigitalOcean ASN.

someonebaggy
You probably have standing to sue Orange for damages if they're blocking your customers from you based on bullshit criteria.

I am not a lawyer, so consult one.

ttul
Spamhaus does not offer the ability to pay for removal. UCEPROTECT is uniquely evil in insisting on payment. It's a good thing that their lists are not widely used, so, in practice, it doesn't matter if your IPs are listed by them. Their revenue comes from unwitting victims who don't know any better.
JohnMakin
Their lists are definitely used, which is the only way I knew about them - some years ago one major email provider was not receiving email from my DO hosted site at all, completely blackholed. I knew enough of what I was doing to know this was practically impossible, spent over a week running every kind of configuration scan and test I could think of, and finally narrowed it down to this organization in particular blacklisting all of DO IP space. Needless to say I was shocked and annoyed at such an unprofessional looking and sounding website wielding such control over the operation of my site (which, lest it needs to be said, was a completely legitimate site).
JohnMakin
DigitalOcean has been on their list for a while, they say something like “if you don’t want to be flagged as spam, dont host on a site that hosts spammers” which is pretty ridiculous given every cloud platform does
mmh0000
It’s not ridiculous.

Hosting providers should be good citizens of the network and immediately terminate spammer accounts. This used to be standard practice until about 2015. When suddenly management decided it’s more profitable host spammers than not.

I think this is a great policy decision by uceprotect.

JohnMakin
Why DigitalOcean in particular though? Why not Cloudflare? A significant percentage of malicious and spam traffic is hosted on or routed through cloudflare services. Why not AWS? Same thing. It's a personal grudge, and they aren't quite big enough or have powerful enough lawyers to cause a widespread problem if put on a list, so, the big players are left alone.

All that aside, the website and their communication around this over the years is extraordinarily unprofessional and it's astounding to me they wield such power.

mmh0000
I ran my own small-business/family mail server for a little over a decade. Spam is out of control.

UCEPROTECT and other RBLs are just lists of text files. They do not block anything. As the mail administrator, you can choose what you do with a UCEPROTECT listing.

When I ran my mail server, I had UCEPROTECT tied into SpamAssassin, so that a UCEPROTECT listing by itself wouldn't block email; it would just raise the "spam probability rating" up.

UCEPROTECT is not a huge professional thing; it's "some guy" who's been running it, effectively, for free since the very early 2000s. No one is obligated to use it. If someone is being blocked by it, they need to contact the mail admin. UCEPROTECT just lists problematic hosts.

On to WHY DO and no CF/AWS? I don't know.. I'm not the "some guy" running the thing. But if I had to guess, it's that DO doesn't respond to spam complaints[1]. Whereas CF/AWS, while they host spammers, will take action against reported spammers.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1cwilrc/does_digi...

xp84
I’m not saying one shouldn’t endeavor to terminate spammers immediately, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t matter if you do, because as soon as you terminate the account, another one’s gonna be spun up immediately with another fake identity. The only thing that would change that would be the exact kind of heavy-handed identity-verification BS that most of us don’t really care for. And even then, it will only change it slightly. Spammers will be paying people in the third world $20 to use their passport to sign up for a cloud hosting account so they can spam for a few days.
ozim
Sounds like this should go via Orange they have means to slap UCEPROTECT on the wrist. It also looks like it would be in Orange business to have proper spam lists not ones like that.
goldenmember
While I absolutely agree that Orange is acting irresponsibly here, I also understand that they're not the only ones who rely on UCEPROTECT.
literalAardvark
Mail server operators have known about uceprotect L3 for a long time.

I've had a successful mail sender on that list for almost two decades.

Your problem is most likely something else, and if it's not something else then Orange are being completely ridiculous.

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ButlerianJihad
For a long time, the Internet has been replete with blocklists and reputation scores cultivated by admins who had the means to track such things. And ad-blocking software/DNS often gives users the chance to tap into those bad reputations and protect themselves.

However, there is nothing preventing function/scope creep of these blocklists into things they should not be. Political bias, censorship, morality policing will trickle into blocklists. Furthermore these false positives are quite onerous for legit businesses and customers who sincerely want to connect. I've connected again to an ad-blocking DNS service, and many people may subscribe to filtering services, or simply be involuntarily subscribed, in the hopes that their Internet would stay usable, and scam-free.

I suppose this is the price to pay in low-trust society (wild and wooly Internet). I wonder if the Great Firewall of China obviates the need for their citizens to throw up such protective measures.

rithdmc
Which Orange are you blocked on?

I personally found Meteor in Ireland (previously owned by Orange) to be far more liberal with blocks on an unregistered mobile internet connection than other providers.

Also, Orange UK have a much stricter block list to enforce than, for example, Orange FR.

swores
Do you mean EE, or are you speaking from memories that are from a while ago?

Orange UK disappeared over a decade ago (merged with T-Mobile to become EE in 2010, then they stopped using the Orange brand in the UK in 2015).

pelagicAustral
I think what's happening is obviously not fair, and should be corrected, but I also what to say that I've had pretty bad experiences when working with DO. I think maybe what happens is that they take too long to weed out problematic accounts. Not going to mention any other provider so it's not assumed that shilling for someone else, but there are quite a few that are no in the AWS, GCP, or Azure tier and work just fine, so, shouldnt be too hard to find a replacement.
mrmattyboy
The uceprotect Level 3 page clearly says using the list will cause collateral damage and should only use as an indicator as part of a spam score, not to act purely on it.

So, yes, if a service provider is known for having a lot of spam coming from it, it makes sense to be on there. They're not saying every IP is bad, they're literally stating the opposite (which seems fair).

So, if Orange are blocking purely based on it, not only are they using a spam filter as a DNS query/web filter (given uceprotect seems to flag based on mail spam traps based detections etc.) and ignoring their documentation (which says it shouldn't be used to block on it's own).

cendyne
UCEPROTECT is why I stopped self hosting my own email :(
someonebaggy
I use my least reputable domains to send emails that are most important for the recipient and least important for me. If they don't receive it now it's their problem not mine.
SoftTalker
That's the thing a lot of people don't understand about email. Delivery is not guaranteed. And neither is notification about failed delivery. Bits can just fall on the floor somewhere and you'll never know.
edoceo
I know of one regulator in USA (WSLCB) that sends critical and time sensitive notifications via email only. Has had delivery problems for at least five years and cannot see the flaw in their system.
account42
That is technically true for any communication method. In practice, email is extremely reliably except for deliberate decisions to drop mail. You can literally shut down your mail server for days and some time after you boot it back up you'll get all the mail people have been sending during that time. What other protocol gives you that reliability without complex failover infrastructure.
garaetjjte
Why do you think Orange is using Uceprotect? It seems unlikely that big corp would use some weird unknown list.
srv12039172893
Many ISPs across EU use Cisco's Talos Intelligence and similar solutions that automatically feed themselves of random blacklists like Uceprotect.
Polizeiposaune
or, perhaps, Talos Intelligence observes the same behaviors observed by the operators of uceprotect and independently identifies the subnet as a source of threats.
mercurialuser
I was reviewing uceprotect policies a couple of hours ago and what you say is really strange.

Uce level 3 should never be used alone to block general tcp traffic.

Are you saying that Orange is using uce level 3 to block email sent from your DO vm? Are you really sure that Orange blocks for this list only? Is it possible that your ip is on another RBL?

If Orange is really blocking smtp based only on uce level 3 they are doing wrong: their system may be mis-configured or they have not read correctly hiw level 3 is populated.

Or - probably - they did on pourpose!

Today I checked september smtp traffic: almost 99% of traffic coming from uce level 1 (single ips) was spam. Traffic hitting level 2 but not present in level 1 (subnets, one I checked was /15!!) was also 99% spam.

Of the 5000k messages received, very few arrived into the mailboxes. A lot of messages were blocked by following spam checks and the few remaining were flagged as spam.

I feel your pain. If you host on DO and you send email, you should look for a email provider that will funnel your emails.

Ps: i repeat, email shoild not be bloocked only by uce level 3

nottorp
Apparently in this uceprotect thing my home ip (business connection, fixed IP) has a "dns problem" because there's a PTR record at my ISP but not an A record.

Seriously?

The rest of the list is as credible as that?

literalAardvark
Yes.

Source: managed a high volume (by layperson standards, it's not very high volume) commercial mail server for more than a decade.

tagyro
Playing the devil’s advocate, my domains get constantly scanned from DO ips. I know it’s not feasible but some basic kyc on DO’s side would probably help.
tcdent
Forgive the snark, but I find it incredibly surprising that in your 20-year career you haven't arrived at the conclusion that self-hosting your own outbound email is not worth it, especially if you don't own and/or manage the reputation of your IPv4 block.
Polizeiposaune
Do you have any direct evidence that the Orange block is due to the listing in UCEPROTECT?

Digital Ocean is not a great neighborhood.

After seeing periodic bursts of login attempts from there, I now block all inbound ssh from AS14061 (among several such bad neighborhoods) as no authorized clients are hosted there and there is a constant level of attempted attacks from there.

throwaway67743
This is not new, "UCEPROTECT" has been a garbage RBL doing this for decades (even listing blocks preemptively, so that when they're assigned they're unusable), nobody worth emailing actually uses it.
john_strinlai
the more ive looked at this uceprotect site, the more i see how unhinged they are.

for example: "People with a brain would simply fix their systems after getting listed for abuse. Stupid losers are different." http://www.uceprotect.org/cart00neys/index.html

"This time, however, we have a premiere: A Woman. Actually, it reads more like a brat than a woman [...] If we were as emotional as you are and report you to our authorities, the handcuffs might click the next time you move your ass off the British Isles." http://www.uceprotect.org/cart00neys/2021-001.html

gregLTS
The bad news is that this is pretty common. The good news is that level 3 shouldn't really affect your email deliverability. It's a bad list that email receivers shouldn't be using, but if you end up on level 1 or 2, that's definitely something that could cause you issues.