IPv6 bites again

Every now and again, one of our users will either get their SMTP credentials stolen, or will get a machine on our network compromised. More often than not, the miscreants responsible will then proceed to send a whole bunch of adverts for V1@gr@ or whatever through our mail servers. This typically results in our mail servers getting (not unreasonably) added to various blacklists, which affects all our users, creates work for us and generally makes for sad times.

We’ve got various measures to counter this, one of which relies on the fact that spam lists are typically very dirty and will generate a lot of rejections. We can use this fact to freeze outgoing mail for a particular user or IP address if it is generating an unreasonable number of delivery failures. The approach we use is based on the, generally excellent, Block Cracking config.

Unfortunately, both we, and the author of the above, overlooked what happens when you start adding IPv6 addresses to a file which uses “:” as its key/value separator, such as that used by Exim’s lsearch lookup. Yesterday evening, a customer’s compromised machine started a spam run to us over IPv6.

Our system raises a ticket in our support queue every time it adds a new IP to our block list so that we can get in touch with the customer quickly. Unfortunately, if the lookup doesn’t work because you haven’t correctly escaped an IPv6 address, it’ll happily keep adding the same IP for each spam email seen, and raising a new ticket each time. Cue one very busy support queue.

Needless to say, the fix was simple enough, but the moral, if there is one is a) test everything that you do with both IPv6 and IPv4 and b) start preparing for IPv6 now, as it’s going to take you ages to find everything that it breaks.

Code making assumptions about what an IP address looks like that will be broken by IPv6 are almost certainly more prevalent than 2-digit year assumptions were 15 years ago.