-
Research
and PublicationsStay -
Conferences
and EventsAnnual Conference
October 15–18, 2013
Save the date!Events for all Levels and Interests
Whether you're looking for a conference to attend face-to-face to connect with peers, or for an online event for team professional development, see what's upcoming.
Stay -
Career
DevelopmentEDUCAUSE Institute
Leadership/Management Programs
Explore MoreCareer Center
Leadership and Management Programs
EDUCAUSE Institute
Advanced Programs
Project Management
Jump Start Your Career Growth
Explore EDUCAUSE professional development opportunities that match your career aspirations and desired level of time investment through our interactive online guide.
Stay -
Focus Areas
and InitiativesLatest Topics
EDUCAUSE organizes its efforts around three IT Focus Areas
Join These Programs If Your Focus Is
Stay -
Connect
and ContributeFind Others
Get on the Higher Ed IT Map
Employees of EDUCAUSE member institutions and organizations are invited to create individual profiles.
Stay -
About
EDUCAUSEUncommon Thinking for the Common Good™
EDUCAUSE is the foremost community of higher education IT leaders and professionals.
Stay
Combating directory harvests
I am wondering what other schools are doing to combat LDAP directory
harvests. We are constantly hit with phishing campaigns. While some
email addresses are grabbed via web searches, malware reading address
books, or other means, I suspect email directory harvests account for a
large percentage of the addresses used in phishing campaigns.
Some ideas we have tossed around for limiting the harvests are:
- Only allow email look-ups to campus address space and campus VPN.
- Rate limit using a firewall or IDP to block an IP address for specific
period of time if connection attempts are made too rapidly.
- Rate limit at the web server that interfaces into the LDAP server.
Only allow a specific number of queries per source IP address per time
period.
- Use a Captcha to reduce the number of automated queries.
- Reduce the number of results returned. Instead of 100 rows, return 5
closest matches.
- Require a valid email address to run the query. Block email accounts
from anonymous email providers.
Has anyone implemented these or other measures to reduce LDAP harvests?
Are there any commercial solutions?
Thanks,
Tyler
--
--
Tyler Schoenke
Network Security Manager
IT Security Office
University of Colorado at Boulder

















Comments
This is a real sore point for me, because even when you've done all of this you'll find out that your org has entered into agreements with others for data sharing and emails are harvested that way.
Our 1st step was a opt out from directory listing. 2nd step was limited search results.
LDAP queries shouldn't go beyond your border without a business relationship. Searching can be done with webapps only with a second query to display email address so out of a single search a follow up query for one email is done.
We haven't done the above, there are bigger fish to fry first.
HTH
Cheers,
Harry
---