A colleague informed 
me this morning that Alan Ralsky is doing widespread bruteforce attacks on SMTP 
AUTH, and they are succeeding, mainly because it's quick, painless (for him), 
and servers and IDS signatures don't generally offer protection against 
them.
 
Could this be why 
everyone's locking up their mail servers all of a sudden?
 
Does anyone know of 
a way to stop them?