Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Clogged With Tons Of Spam
DoorFrame writes: "This story talks about how Verizon feels it has been the victim of a malicious assault in which they received millions of pieces of spam that have delayed the delivery of email along the old Bell Atlantic lines. It's said to affect 200,000 of its Internet customers on the East Coast who may have to wait hours for their emails to arrive. They're going through the process of clearing the backlog now."
Ever notice that if you reply to spam to be removed from their mailing list, that the message bounces back to you? Spammers often just disable mail accounts after sending you a message.
What I would propose is a sort of Handshaking for spam free e-mail. Three transactions would be required.
1) Sender sends the message.
2) Receiver sends back a small packet verifing receipt.
3) Sender sends back another small packet to verify that the receipt was recieved.
The important part is the 3rd phase. If the 3rd phase doesn't happen, mail gets sorted out in the user's spam folder.
It's not a perfect solution, but surely it would make it more difficult for spammers.
Sure would be sweet if we could poison the spam databases.
I prefer abuse@verizon.com, or whatever the name of the company is. But I hold an extra grudge against the new Verizon, they are attempting to be worse than UUNET at the peak of their open mail relay fiasco.
/. until it makes it into some spammers mailing list. A single email address I posted on /. three years ago is still picking up 5-10 spams a week, the only email that goes to that honeypot.
Just by putting these email addresses on slashdot will generate 3-15 spams a day from harvesters. It takes about 3 days from the time a non-obfuscated email address gets posted on
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Well, now they know how those of us who've had a hotmail account for more than 5 seconds feel like.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even if laws require the spammer to quit spamming you upon request, he says "fine", and the he SELLS your email address, which is now more valuable since you proved that someone reads mail there, to many more spammers, with whom you don't have any "no spam" requests filed with. So "complaining to them" actually makes them more money. The only proper solution is to block them at the router level with ipchains (in DENY mode, not REJECT, for force connections to wast the most time possible until they timeout).
The difference between junk mail in your post office mail box and spam in your email is that when someone sends you junk mail, they pay for the mailing, and you pay for nothing.
On the other hand, there are many people all over the world who pay for their internet access per minute or per byte or some other way (wireless especially). Then, the person getting the spam winds up paying for it. How would you like it if every time you got a piece of spam you had to pay 32 cents for it?
- Tony
// No comment
Junk email has several massive down-sides which tend to get ignored, especially in the US where Internet usage is unmetered. In most countries, Internet usage is metered, usually by the second. This means that people who receive junk email have to pay, directly, to receive it. If the call is long distance, or wireless, it can be a substantial amount of money. Enough to discourage use of email as a tool. The unpredictability of spam also means that most people are unwilling to do other things that would make email more useful. For instance, want your cellphone to alert you to incoming mail? If you have to pay for each notification, and 75% of those notifications would be MMF schemes, probably not.
Even if you're lucky enough to have an unmetered connection, spam costs your ISP in extra bandwidth charges, more time with the modems being tied up to serve unwanted emails to customers. The bandwidth argument can't be underestimated - spam is, by its nature, a peaky activity, that is an ISP receiving spam will find a mass of emails being sent in one go, rather than spread out eating up tiny, unnoticable, amounts of bandwidth at any point. And that means it's not just bandwidth at stake, it's your ISP's mailserver getting an event indistinguishable from a DoS attack.
Trees may not be cut down as a result of spam, but they're not saved by it either. And spam adds real costs to the provision of your Internet service. It reduces what you can do with email. And your Internet service suffers because of it.
Still want it?
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
They could institute severe civil and criminal penalties for unauthorized computer access (i.e., using an open mail relay without permission) and for fraudulent misrepresentation and damage to reputation (faking headers and addresses). That would take care of 90% of spam. Blacklists of ISPs that permit spamming would take care of most of the rest.
I'm surprised that more ISPs don't track down and sue spammers who fake headers. I'd gladly hunt and disembowel any slime who faked spam headers to look like it was coming from one of my domains. (I'd just go to small claims court, but someone like Verizon could put their stable of high-power lawyers to good use and crush the spamming bastards like the cockroaches they are.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I have had Verizon online DSL for about a year now, and the support is absolutely nonexistent. Every week my line goes down at least once for about 10 hours at a time. Although the physical connection is fine and the modem handshakes, my PPPoE client recieves an endless stream of authorization packets. It simply cant finish authorizing me since the packets are in not in any sort of order. Every time I tried to get support, they told me they "cant support a Linux machine." Unfortunately for me, they didnt understand that it was not a problem with my operating system. Their lazy support staff saw "linux" and read it as "get out of jail free", and dumped me out of their support queue. After trying to convince them, I finally used a roomate's windows box to see if it miraculously worked when my linux box did not. Obviously, windows was also not able to connect. I called the support and explained this to them, and they said they'd get back to me. That was 4 weeks ago. Dont use verizon online dsl, they are definitely not nice folk.
plenty to put those kind out of biz over night!!!
:-)
Then we regroup and focus on those cgi based
webpage signup forms
man you the script kiddies could be heros
if they focused thier attention on spammers
wouldn't that be fun to watch?
http://Lenny.com
Seriously, I get their own inhouse generated spam all the time. I got tired of checking for new messages and getting their ads.
Wonder how it feels when the shoe is in the other foot eh?
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Here's how it would work. I tell my ISP to activate the money-based spamproofing system. Anybody who e-mails me for the first time is asked to agree that it costs them 25 cents per e-mail. (When I first activate the service, I can upload my e-mail address book so that my actual friends don't have to pay and never get the request to authorize the 25-cent micropayment.) If someone e-mails me and it's not spam, I click a button to say I don't want their money.
This solves the spam problem forever. We even have a micropayment infrastructre in place: PayPal. OK, PayPal has a lot of problems, such as being essentially incapacitated for the last month, but at least they take customers from a bunch of countries outside the U.S. now. One hopes they'll either add enough servers this xmas season or else that somebody will build a better alternative.
Find free books.
Verizon's servers are spammer's heaven. Their mail servers are blacklisted by ORBS and I have often gotten connect errors when trying to send mail -- so their servers are probably not administered properly. That's why I keep my mail elsewhere. I have had severe DSL outages in the past with them -- not lately though.
Local ISP users get mail bounced because spam has put them over quota, UU net has to double capacity to keep up & Verizon can't deliver e-mail in a timely manner. Every one of these people has been denied service do to unsolicted commercial e-mail.
Everyone says "taking a spammer to court takes to much time", "not worth the effort", "To costly and to long", "you can't get blood from a stone", "It won't do any good". It seems to me that if you hurt spammers finacially, and hunt them down that eventually they start to go out of business. Make the risks TOO high for them, make the profits too low.
I know they can spam from bora bora (save those flames for somone else), but you I can put bora bora IP's in my router and be done with the whole mess. It makes it MUCH easier to force them into a corner, and then wall up that corner a la Count of Monte Crisco.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Every time some web site/software company makes me give them my email address, I enter "support@verizon.com" or "sales@verizon.com". I guess it has just added up so much that it brought their servers down.
Feel sorry for everyone who won't be getting their mail though. Maybe this will change their policy on selling email lists.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
I'd hope the next time that someone complains to Verizon about spam, Verison would do something about it.
Many ISPs, don't take it seriously. This might help.
Fight Spammers!
Today, the business world moves at cyberspeed. And if your business can't keep up, you may be missing opportunities. But now you can get the high-speed Internet access you need at a reduced rate - as little as $49.95 a month. With Verizon Online DSL, you'll enjoy sizzling downloads over your existing phone lines. It's always on, so there's no dialing and no busy signals. You can even use the same phone lines for voice calls, faxes or credit card authorization while you're online! You've got three "speed options" to choose from, and starting is not only easy, but free - FREE DSL modem, FREE installation and FREE service connection! So bring your business up to speed now--with Verizon. For more information on Verizon Online DSL Plus, click here http://mx01.opt-in-net.net/cgi-bin/eclick.cgi?lin
This was sent to an address I have never used, the spammer they hired built it from a domain I owned and my first name. I'm sure this information was supplied to them by network solutions.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
This is a great example of how spam mail is a waste of resources the same way it is a waste of resources to use a fax machine to spam other fax machines. Of course its illegal to do that and we need the same legislation to do the same to spammers.
I'm just sitting around waiting for this to hit critical mass, when mostly every mailserver and mailbox is jammed packed with crap. Maybe we'll start seeing some attention hungry politicians on TV giving a speech on how "our information age wil come to a crash unless we pass this measure immediately."
6 test messages duplicate message = 4 times instant delivery = 0 delayed 1 hr = 4
I also just got 4 messages this morning that were 2 days old.
Having dealt with Verizon/BA about my DSL line that was up only 70% when I first got it, I got to know their tech support procedure pretty well. As far as I can tell, they do not inform their customers of an outage while it is happening. They usually wait until it has either hit the news or 200 people call to complain before they even acknowledge it. They will deal with it when they get the chance, but it also seems that their high level network and system people only work 9-5 five days a week.
I wish I could switch to another broadband company, but nothing else is available in my area.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)