Broadband Crackdown

MrPeach writes: "In a move unsurprising to those of us who have had interactions with their so-called customer support, AT&T Broadband and Excite@Home are indefinitely filtering all incoming traffic on http port 80 for residential customers. They could have cut access to those running compromised servers, but instead chose to deny the ability to run a web server to all subscribers to their service. DSL anyone?" DSL won't save you. Verizon is apparently also blocking port 80 for their DSL customers, in addition to blocking outgoing port 25 and requiring use of Verizon's SMTP servers to send email. Verizon is also cheerfully paying fines for screwing over their competitors - the fines will be much less than the extra profit they can squeeze out once their competition is gone.

Comments

As a CLEC, this is how we have been coping.

[phoenix_orb]

I work for a regional CLEC out of chicago. We have several thousand installed DSL lines. This is how we have been coping with the Code Red worm... (*as a buisness class of service, we can't be simply turning off all port 80.. many people do host off of our SDSL lines*)

We have a large number of 10.x.x.x addresses for our broadband subscribers. (This saves us the trouble of assigning public IP's to every single customer, because most don't want nor need a public IP). Our NAT server was getting so clogged up with TCP/IP sessions because code red was serching for hosts. (and once it got into the 10.x.x.x network, it has lots of addresses to check.

We simply got a free scanning utility (sorry... I am at home, don't have it here, nor the time to find it. ) After scanning all of our customers, we located around 30 infected computers.) We left messages stating that they were infected, and we were shutting off there connection until they would remove the offending computer..(we could discern the IP itself, and our users are statically assigned, not DHCP thank god..)

Several users were irate as all hell, but the good of the many outwieigh the good of the few correct? Many times the customer simply unplugged the computer and we put them back on. They are then responsible for patching it.. We have been running scans everyday, and have now gotten fewer and fewer code red worms in our user's DSL systems.

I think that this was the ideal approach. Why use a damn sledgehammer when all of about 30 minutes of work allows you to use a use a fly swatter to remove the offending computers.

You can thank IIS..

[victwenty]

Blocking port 80 is the only practical way providers such as @home have to control code red. I'm on their network and in the last 48 hours, I've gotten:

[root@gamara log]# grep DPT=80 messages | wc -l

3722

code red hits, all from other @home users. All W2K/IIS 5.0 users. The ip's I've looked into all have the default pages up too. I've even tried running "dir" commands on a few through the "root.exe" backdoor code red installs, incredulous that it would work, and yes.. thousands of wide open NT boxen. This hasn't even seemed to slow down yet, despite the wide spread publicity which leads me to believe that a large percentage of those stricken are either totally clueless, don't realize they have IIS running (?), or flat out don't care which leaves the ISP little choice. And it may be my perception, or unrelated factors, but my net connection has certaintly seemed more sluggish over the last week, perhaps as a result of upstream saturation, something @home doesn't have much of.

So I would agree, blocking port 80 is the most practical way of defeating this and it should have happened earlier. It's that or ban all microsoft operating systems as a public hazard :)