Slashdot Mirror
Bad Behavior on the 'Net - Who Pays the Bandwidth Bill?
rakolam asks: "I am involved with network management in the hosting department of a fairly large ISP. Constantly we have customers who dispute inbound bandwidth spikes and demand service credits on their burstable connections. Events such as the Slammer Virus literally have everyone knocking on their salesperson's door at the end of the billing cycle. My position is that the internet is a public space, and by placing themselves in that space, one has to realize the consequences (and the implications of burstable billing). I'd like Slashdot's perspective on this. Should ISP's ultimately eat the costs of malicious behavior? Is the customer ultimately responsible for the bandwidth they've generated, regardless if it's desired or not? Is this a new frontier for insurance companies?"
What happens to you if someone runs an extension cord from your house or if you spring an unknown water leak? You get a huge bill and you fix the problem. How is this different?
The best way to do is to be.
Every ISP should base charges only on how much traffic you send. That would give people a real incentive to keep their systems patched and secured. You wouldn't have to pay a ridiculous amount if you're on the receiving end of a DOS. You would have to pay if your systems get hacked or catch a worm though.
Alas, unless every ISP participated, this model wouldn't work well.
If someone steals my credit card number, the credit card company won't even charge me the $50 that they have the legal right to. I doubt that ISPs will be able to fare any better.
Keep up to date on current worms and other bandwidth threats. Notify your customers about these threats, and provide information on how to eliminate or reduce the impact.
Any massive bandwidth they log after that, is their responsibility. You notified them, and they did not listen.
After a few incidents like that, they will start to listen to your warning messages.
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The customer pays what is in his contract. Make the language very explicit. There is no reason the ISP should eat it.
Should /. pay the bill for the /. effect?
-Peace
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Give them a complete or partial rebate, the first time, and have a set of "How can I protect myself?" documentation ready for the user. Email it to them, mail it to them, fax it to them, whatever it takes to get them to read it.
Inform them that if they ignore those suggestions, and future problems end up costing them money, then they'll have to foot the bill.
This way, the customer walks away happy and informed, and if they're really willing to be a good net citizen, they won't come back crying.
If they're not willing to do what's required of them, they'll get stuck paying for it.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
My previous employer was unfortunate enough to be attacked by a series of distributed ICMP ping flood attacks. Our bill jumped from under $1K per month (Canadian) to over $10K in less than a day.
We adjusted our monitoring process to detect these spikes early and contact our ISP to deny traffic from the offending subnets. Luckily, our ISP was willing to do this, even though they still incurred traffic from inbound packets. Luckily, these attacks originated from a few subnets that could be isolated.
As a further kludge, we eventually disabled ICMP altogether on our routers, and lived without ping and traceroute.
Having a host on the net is a risky proposition. You pay for inbound and outbound traffic, regardless of the source, packet type, or quantity. DDoS attacks can not only prevent your server from being accessable, they could literally bankrupt you if you become a target and don't take preventative measures.
Hmm... One click bankruptcy. I wonder if anyone has tried to patent this yet...
Our ISP was technically capable of detecting and thwarting various attacks. Ultimately, the policy of monitoring and contacting an ISP when traffic exceeds a certain threshold seems like a workable solution for average co-locaters.
Given the architecture of the Internet, it's difficult to see how we could shift the burden to pay away from the server to the client. It seems like a problem remarkably similar to the problem of spam.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
Suppose you live on a crosspoint of several countries. Your house happens to be located in a dangerous curve on the road. Also for some reason your house looks to some kiddies like it asks to be vandalized.
For these reasons you get a lot of breakin attempts, occasionally a truck crashes through your walls. All this is not only by people from your own country, but from neighbouring countries as well.
You install warning lights and other measures so cars and trucks don't come in crashing. You call the police when kiddies vandalize your home, but they says they can't do anything.
All this costs you a lot of money and headaches.
In real life there are several ways to defend yourself:
Now apply these principles to your hosting server.
Suppose your house is rented. Is the person renting you the house responsible for every breach? Did he warn you before you signed the contract? Is it his responsability to call you every time some vandals are passing on the road? Or some truck may crash into your home?
Of course your ISP can warn you for every threat that may be coming, but what if there's no warning time? Or he misses a small thing that happens to affect your server bigtime? Is the ISP really responsible?
Be careful out there...
ISP A has customer X. ISP B has malicious user Y. Malicious user Y sends huge quantities of packets to user X.
The question seems to be, should ISP A eat the cost, or should customer X eat it? Why the hell are those the only two options?! It seems to me like ISP *B* should eat the cost, since the malicious packets were sent through their network in the first place. ISP B can attempt to recover their loss directly from malicious user Y.
The ISP *and* the customer are both victims in a DOS attack. Whoever runs the network which *initiated* the attack should be responsible.