On 13 Dec 2008, at 12:39, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:33:51 -0800 "Tomas L. Byrnes" <tomb@byrneit.net> wrote:
Because anyone with half a brain blocks proxies from their e- commerce site. What is a proxy? A garden-variety squid server, in the DMZ of a corporate firewall? The nasty box in some hotels that "helps" guests surf the net? A socks proxy installed by the RBN on unsuspecting desktops?
Hi, We've all jumped on Tomas, but I suspect that the word 'open' was missing from his summary. I've worked in e-commerce environments where we deployed tools that checked whether orders with high risk scores appeared to come through an open proxy, and unusual browsing patterns were detected and investigated for the same. I wont give the game away, since some of the people on this list will be able to work out who I am talking about :-) but open proxies are a source of fraudulent orders, and also competitors spidering e-commerce sites for price and availability information. Making it harder for both was an important job - both groups of troublemakers would look for a softer target elsewhere. Andy