Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by justinclift 2142 days ago
Just a reminder, from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH#Email_spam):

  As of November 2019, OVH is listed by The Spamhaus Project as the world's
  second worst Internet service provider for the proliferation of unsolicited bulk E-Mail
https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/ovh.net

Looking at the same list now, it recently seems to have added fraud, and many malware distribution entries too.

5 comments

This is like saying Google is the search engine with the most links to malware pages. 36 IPs is nothing given how big ovh is.
Those entries aren't all singular IP addresses. Some are ranges (etc).

Picking one at random:

https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/query/SBL492369

That's showing a fair number of IPs.

I can't speak to reports but I can testify about server logs. OVH IPs have been a top source of spam and attacks against my (US) (<10) servers for most of a decade. I'd add Digital Ocean to round out the top 2 list.

If a firewall goes offline for 60 seconds, I will get hammered from OVH/DO networks. Not exclusively but they're the standout kings. Just think Psychz networks, but scaled up.

I know OVH's size plays into that. But size here is less about the number of net blocks and more about their bureaucratic disinterest in abuse (common to larger hosts, inc hosts I like).

There are comparable sized hosts in the US (AWS, Azure) but when it comes to crapty traffic, OVH makes them look small and insignificant[1].

Unlike moderation at scale, known attacks are often qualifiable, detectable patterns. Can we please care enough to notice & maybe eventually, one day interrupt them?

[1]disclaimer: Spam from Google/Azure & malicious SMTP traffic from AWS totally dominated the first ½ of this year. IDK why. It's since died off - which differentiates them from OVH/DO.

Is this the list you are referring to? https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/networks/

Seems like OVH is not on it anymore.

Cool. Sounds like they've put good effort into cleaning things up then. :)
It's the biggest European cloud provider.
That’s good, it means they won’t bother me about whatever I choose to host. Thanks for your recommendation!