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."

Comments

Re:Whoops--it must have been me... And me

[anticypher]

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.

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 /. 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.

the AC

(OT)"Spam" topic icon and SPAM� trademark

[yerricde]

From re:SPAM:

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

It looks like somebody needs to change http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicspam.jpg

sux

[hugg]

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.

SPAM is a DOS attack

[cluge]

Why can't SPAM be considered a DOS?

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.

Whoops--it must have been me...

[big.ears]

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.

serves them right

[sethgecko]

I have a DSL account with them. I get 1 master email address plus 3 others. I immediately created a new email account to use day to day and never used the master account for *anything*. I get spam on it every now and then--they are the only ones who have it which means they are selling my address to spammers. When I say I never used the master account, I mean *never*. Not even to contact them.

Feel sorry for everyone who won't be getting their mail though. Maybe this will change their policy on selling email lists.

I tested this five days ago.

[jpostel]

One of my clients sent me an email to my home account last week. Since I never got it, I decided to send a couple of test messages from my webmail accounts to test it out. Here's what I found when I went through the headers of the test messages:

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.