Dealing with SMTP invalid command attack
- by mark
One of our semi-busy mail servers (sendmail) has had a lot of inbound connections over the past few days from hosts that are issuing garbage commands.
In the past two days:
incoming smtp connections with invalid commands from 39,000 unique IPs
the IPs come from various ranges all over the world, not just a few networks that I can block
the mail server serves users throughout north america, so I can't just block connections from unknown IPs
sample bad commands: http://pastebin.com/4QUsaTXT
I am not sure what someone is trying to accomplish with this attack, besides annoy me.
any ideas what this is about, or how to effectively deal with it?