September 29, 2016 By Larry Loeb < 1 min read

Spamhaus and SpamCop serve as blocklist generators for mail servers all over the internet. They both deal with the unwanted spam that affects users, much of which is fairly innocuous.

But since cybercriminals do generate spam as part of their attachment-spreading campaigns, keeping spam under control means avoiding spam network hijacking.

Spam Network Hijacking Spikes

Spamhaus recently warned that it observed a spike in network hijacking in support of spam campaigns. Specifically, the company is most concerned about the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking it detected, Softpedia reported.

This type of hijack causes an internet service provider (ISP) to falsely announce to all other service providers that an IP range has been found on its network. The ISP can then receive the traffic destined for that range of IP. Perhaps more importantly to the spammer, it can send traffic that uses the IP address space of the hijacked network.

Spamhaus has seen this activity grow over the last three years, but the impetus for the growth may not be readily apparent. One reason for the rise in hijacking is the shrinking pool of IPv4 addresses available to spammers. If a blocking service bans a spamming address, the spammer has limited choices with which to replace it.

It seems that BGP hijackers like to take over legacy IP ranges. The true legacy owners may not care about their IPv4 space anymore, making them an easy target.

Spam Wars in Full Swing

Softpedia further noted that the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) had similarly sounded the alarm in June about an increase in IPv4 range hijacks. The group said that criminals were registering fake companies or re-registering old domain names without the authority to take over the older IPv4 ranges.

As the spam wars reignite, alternative methods of spam determination may prove useful when a blocklist alone isn’t enough.

More from

FYSA — VMware Critical Vulnerabilities Patched

< 1 min read - SummaryBroadcom has released a security bulletin, VMSA-2025-0004, addressing and remediating three vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could lead to system compromise. Products affected include vCenter Server, vRealize Operations Manager, and vCloud Director.Threat TopographyThreat Type: Critical VulnerabilitiesIndustry: VirtualizationGeolocation: GlobalOverviewX-Force Incident Command is monitoring activity surrounding Broadcom’s Security Bulletin (VMSA-2025-0004) for three potentially critical vulnerabilities in VMware products. These vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, and CVE-2025-22226, have reportedly been exploited in attacks. X-Force has not been able to validate those claims. The vulnerabilities…

SoaPy: Stealthy enumeration of Active Directory environments through ADWS

10 min read - Introduction Over time, both targeted and large-scale enumeration of Active Directory (AD) environments have become increasingly detected due to modern defensive solutions. During our internship at X-Force Red this past summer, we noticed FalconForce’s SOAPHound was becoming popular for enumerating Active Directory environments. This tool brought a new perspective to Active Directory enumeration by performing collection via Active Directory Web Services (ADWS) instead of directly through Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as other AD enumeration tools had in the past.…

Smoltalk: RCE in open source agents

26 min read - Big shoutout to Hugging Face and the smolagents team for their cooperation and quick turnaround for a fix! Introduction Recently, I have been working on a side project to automate some pentest reconnaissance with AI agents. Just after I started this project, Hugging Face announced the release of smolagents, a lightweight framework for building AI agents that implements the methodology described in the ReAct paper, emphasizing reasoning through iterative decision-making. Interestingly, smolagents enables agents to reason and act by generating…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today