[Dovecot] POP3 dictionary attacks

Michael Orlitzky michael at orlitzky.com
Sat Aug 16 01:45:03 EEST 2008


Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote:
> Charles Marcus wrote:
>> Dictionary attacks are a fact of life these days.
>>
>> Just install some kind of blocking on your firewall (fail2ban is a good
>> one), and let it take care of the worst of it..
> 
> I wonder what  they want by cracking a POP3 server. Read the user's
> mails? It's true POP3 passwords are almost always equal to SMTP ones
> (which is useful for spamming), but then why not try to crack the SMTP
> server directly?
> 

There may not be anything interesting in the user's inbox initially, but 
there might be after the attacker starts sending password reminders from 
eBay, Paypal, etc.



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