Spammers Grab IP Space Assigned to Egyptian President's Wife

Incredibly just hours after I published the post on why reputation is becoming less relevant due to the runout of IPv4 address space, I read this article on eWeek talking about the hijack of IPv4 address space.

Here's the excerpt:

Spammers have control of thousands of IP addresses assigned to the wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the science center that bears her name. According to the Spamhaus Project, spammers hijacked IP addresses assigned to Suzanne Mubarak and the Suzanne Mubarak Science Exploration Center. The move is typical of spammers trying to get their hands on Internet address space that has not been blacklisted, security pros told eWEEK. “Spammers hijack IP address space to be able to use IPs that are not…listed as having been used for spam, so that their spam has a greater chance of being delivered,” said Mike Geide, senior security researcher for Zscaler. “IP address hijacking by spammers does occur regularly. It also occurs on occasion from accidents/misconfigurations."

It's another indication that reputation as I mentioned is going to be less relevant. Hackers were able to take over IP address space with a good reputation in order to accomplish their bad deed of sending spam.