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Spam Slows Australian Net Traffic
JohnPM writes "A sudden, sustained surge in traffic has slowed Australian email drastically over the past week. Spam and computer viruses are believed to be largely responsible."
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UPDATE: Officials have tracked down the actual source of the problem. It turns out that Slashdot was linking to stories in the .au domain.
</obviousjoke>
A sudden, sustained surge in traffic will slow an Australian news site drastically over the next few hours. ;)
"That's not a DDOS. *pulls out Inbox*
Now THAT's a DDOS!"
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
The surge in traffic is probably due to the explosive growth in popularity of BitTorrent.
The article does not mention the amount of outbound spam from Australia. Which I have been getting a lot of lately. In fact, come to think of it, exactly in the time frame mentioned in the article.
Perhaps this is the best argument for charging for bandwith usage, or at least the most acceptable to Slashdotters. It gives a financial incentive to people to clean up their systems and stop being easy prey to worms and viruses, and makes them pay for the damage they cause (whether deliberately or just through carelessness and using insecure software).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Just goes to show, that even by passing legislation to stop spam there is very little that we can do to stop spam effectivly at a countrywide / worldwide network level. Although i for one know not what to do, we do need some system to sort out penis extensions and free deplomas from legit email. Perhaps we should seriously consider a form of email registration? Maybe we should just start closing networks up...
Wow!
.. good thing slashdot isn't getting more technical .. it would have to be rocket science ^_^
Now that's what I'd call *in-depth* report..
Viruses are probably the main culprit; I don't see any reason why the volume of spam would suddenly increase.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I read the article and I don't get it, how/why did all Australian spammers manage to send spam over the Australian network at the same time? Was there only one source for it, or many spammers did it simultaniously?
As for computer viruses, there haven't been any viruses lately.
And the article doesn't say anything about the reason, although ISPs can easily track down those spammers
The IT section color scheme sucks.
One trend has been penis enlargement spams entitled "Enlarge Up to 3 Inches".
If an increase up to a 3 inch total length is something that would do you good, you've really got a major anatomical problem there, mr bobbit.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Fight Spammers!
First they let the music downloaders in, then all sorts of misfits start to take over their net.
Xaotik Designs
It's all those aussies downloading music now ;P
Spam and computer viruses are believed to be largely responsible
i think its funny that these are put as if they are so different. almost seems that they are by nature one entity and different manifestations.....almost like some ancient egyptian religious structure of pure evil..
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Optus and Telstra published apologies on their websites and on voicemail because of slow delivery times.
Ad below:
Unlimited bandwidth with optus only $49.95 a month
Its Chili's getting back at Outback Steakhouse for
stealing the receipe for the Awesome Blossum!
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Reading articles like this brings a serious question to mind: why don't ISP's monitor for suspicious behavior and sue spammers and others who cause disruption and/or damage to infrastructure by abusing resources? It's trivial to set up software to look at the rate of port 25 connections coming from an address and alert ops staff when something out of the ordinary is happening. It would almost certainly be in the best interest of the ISP to do so, because these are not people they want on their networks, given how much they make their service undesirable to other users and force them to spend to upgrade infrastructure. After a while, spammers really would be relegated to only spammer-friendly ISPs, who can then be blacklisted.
I took the time to set up this script the other day, and being the strange person that I am I also had saved all spam in a separate folder, so was able to graph this going some time back:
http://www.ispol.com/home/grisha/spam.html
it's out of control, that's for sure.
Spam and computer viruses are believed to be largely responsible."
Surely, having a less than diverse telecommunications infrastructure has nothing to do with it. If it weren't for Telstra, would there be more networks and more routes making spam problems have less impact on the entire network? Hmmm?
If they would have installed the patch that MS has been emailing to EVERYONE , they wouldn't have this problem!
By the way: has anyone noticed Windows being particularly unstable recently? (More than usual)
</noob>
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Did anyone else note that this started about the same time as the DO-NOT-CALL list took effect in the USA?
Maybe they just getting the overflow from the telemarketers.
[beat others to silly joke]
1. Do not call takes effect in USA.
2. Spam Australia.
3. ???
4. Profit!
[/beat others to silly joke]
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The problem is that email is already very bandwidth efficient. Let's say that you make a very short (60 seconds at 64 kbps) phone call. That phone call used 480kB (SI) of bandwidth. That's enough for several hundred email messages.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Does anyone have the command to crash mIRC?
this article reads like it was written by a junior highschool 'journalism' student. it has no content. why bother to post this? really?
I assume the slowdown has to do with recent attempts to implement RFC8829 which has to do with using koala bears to route data packets through an intricate network of eucalyptus trees. In attempts I've seen, this results in the koala bears eating the root DNS and then falling asleep.
Studies show that an increase in the volume of traffic in LA County highways has lead to more congestion and longer commute times and slower driving. Profound!
Well, except when O.J. is driving. Then it's just slow driving.
Seriously though...WTF? Duh.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
This is where procmail comes in handy to just drop anything that hits the server and not DOS dialup lines. OK its not perfect but it helps cut down traffic slightly
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Simple as that?
It's nice to increasingly see these types of news stories reported in the media. It impresses upon people the cost of spam -- administrative expense, increased bandwidth usage, lost productivity, etc.
Yet would you believe that spammers themselves think they're not doing anything wrong? Many of them, like this guy think they're legitimate business people. They think there is nothing immoral, destructive, or un-neighborly about spam.
And you think it's just a weird coincidence that virus traffic and spam are both on the rise? This lends more credibility to the growing concern among mail administrators, myself included, that spammers are setting up major worldwide spam injection networks using viruses.
I saw we should stop spam trafficing, it is time to put an end to these (various) processed meats Products!!
-Seriv
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1199?show=repl ies
These days I get about 50 spams a day, and about half that many normal mails. I use Outlook (YYW) with the Outclass bayesian plugin from vargonsoft. It works so well I rarely see any of the spam, but what I've found now is that spam has started serving a useful purpose: it tells me all's well with the server. If I fire up Outlook in the morning and I don't have any mail, I know something's wrong, because I *always* have some spam. If I go for half an hour with no spam, the server's probably down.
It's sort of a dialtone for email.
Of course, I still hate the useless pathetic shitfucks and hope their entire pointless lives are so painwracked and miserable that they only become retrospectively briefly content when they die and find to everyone's surprise that hell does exist, but only for them and Gary Glitter.
assign the full responsibility for this situation on 'Roos? Let's face it: they are the a) the least trustworthy of the marsupials and b) the most likely to get involved in disreputable marketing. Has anyone forgotten the 1996 "Hopping Diet" pills (ephedra, caffeine, nicotine and that special ingredient, speed)?
Think about it -- the Spammers and the hackers flood the networks with garbage traffic, impacting millions of users and thousands of businesses.
Currently over 20% of my bandwidth on a 1.5Mbit link is wasted by ping floods and other attempted attacks. We are not talking about a few script kiddies anymore, but thousands of infected nodes performing distributed attacks.
Skip throwing the book at them, and don't waste tax dollars housing these degenerates. Flag them as terrorists for their constant attacks on public infrastructures, and treat them accordingly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It may sound a bit cruel (depending on your level of exasperation) and it may result in the actual death of a spammer or two (picture the outcries and sorrow... not) but it'd sure play to the advancement of humanity as a whole.
Does their evil know no bounds?
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Curiously timed hacking attempt into my Chicago network router this weekend,
originating from an APNIC IP.
Perhaps they don't like the Cubs.
This just in: the internet is actually slowing down because of a large volume of traffic on IP ports. Experts say, IP ports are like freeways -- the more cars, the more it slows down. :)
One U.S. expert said: "Australia is so far away -- and there are no exits along the way!"
so true, so true.
stuff |
Laws which require jail time for spammers would certainly get attention. If they're not in the U.S., have them extradited for their crimes against humanity. Make them hand write letters of apology to every person they have spammed. Cruel and unusual punishment ought to be allowed if the crime in question was cruel and unusual.
Sent from my iPhone
If you track a spammer, and take them to small claims and receive a $500 or $1000 judgment, that will help against spam -- when many people do the same thing.
Fight Spammers!
"Worse yet, if mail filters send out one message for every copy of Sobig.F received, they are in effect doubling the amount of traffic. This makes them a part of the problem, not a part of the solution."
If their usual 30 million messages/day goes up 20%, and the average message is 10 KB, that's an extra 60GB/day (* 8bits/byte / 86400 sec/day) -> 5.5 megabits/second. So they need an extra 3 E1 lines, or half a slow Ethernet. In practice they'd need more, because it's not spread out evenly across the day, but it shouldn't be killing them.
Now, Telstra always had the reputation of being the developed world's most data-clueless telco, with a stupidity and greed level similar to the US cable modem companies.... But even so, this shouldn't be that much strain on them as a bandwidth provider.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
yet another chance to join the increasingly popular planet/population rescue, & newclear power initiatives.
many greed/fear/ego based fauxking ediots continue to pretend there is no creator, & that they are the center of something. lookout bullow on that won.
you won't be needing an email alert when the big flash occurs.
the daze of the phonIE payper liesense georgewellian fuddite southern baptist stock markup execrable, is WANing into coolapps/the abyss.
for each of the creator's innocents harmed, there is a badtoll that must/will be repaid by you/US, as the aforementioned perpetrators will not be available to make reparations after the big flash occurs.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator..... get ready to see the light.
Looks like someone's compiled a new CD with 50 zillion email addresses all in Australia!
Otherwise, it's all the spammers that fled the anti-spam legislation and decided to move to Australia with a 2 way satellite link.. spamming day & night
Congratulations on playing the terrorist card. I could *never* get tired of *that* comparison.
Look, ping floods, virus attacks, and 100-200 spam emails I have to sort through every day suck. It makes my job more difficult, it makes my connection slower and/or more expensive, and it generally degrades my whole internet experience, but spam isn't killing any babies. FFS, if you think Viagra adverts and mortgage rate quotes are terrorism, you need to watch some news footage of actual terrorism, where you can see some wounded and dead people and understand the word terrorism.
This habit of applying terrorism labels to every harmful crime really cheapens the definition of the word. Yes, spam is harmful and network intrusions should be prosecuted in these cases to the extent of the law. But no one has died from DDoSes. You should be able to express your anger and indignance at spammers and crackers without drawing comparisons to the most horrific, evil practices in the world.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Boycott ISPs that charge for email traffic.
Boycott ISPs that do not provide IMAP and require you to POP3 all Newest MS Patch crap.
Boycott ISPs that refuse to block well-known spam sources.
Spam will never stop until we stop ISPs profiting from it.
Yes!!
This is exactly what needs to be done! The only people negatively affected by this are people running mail servers on their consumer level accounts. To them-- I am truly sorry. No sarcasm there, running your own server is "cool" and does allow you a somewhat higher level of control over your "domain" than relying on your ISP's server. But this spam problem is just out of hand, and let's face it-- running a server is just not "consumer level". Sorry. Pay a little more for a business level account. And "zcat NZ" is correct, your IP address is probably on a DUL anyway (or will be soon).
http://www.brightmail.com/spamstats.html#spam_perc entages
What? All my Email Accounts, along with the accounts of most everyone I know recieve around 75-90% Spam.
Only my account that subscribes to bugtraq and some other security focus lists doesn't have such a ratio.
Anybody who subscribes to those lists (should be almost everybody B-)) Knows that that doesn't say mutch though, with 20 messages a day from some of those lists, it's crazy.
But I degress, one account I've had for around 4 years now would be broken due to spam if it wasn't for yahoo's nice filters, now I don't see a drop of it. But my 'Bulk Mail' folder will fill up my 4meg account often in about a week, and I only maintain about 100-200k of saved stuff in there. Oh well, I did a little research for other people paying attention to their ammounts of spam (maybe blatent karma whoring, but who cares hehe):
spamfryer?
Spam Cop
Why spam is bad - Apparently a personal spam site
HiWaay - Alabama ISP, keeping records and real time graphs.
Other Interesting stuff:
MyRealBox - Test bed for Novells Mail server development, checkout the license agreement to get a free mail box, seriously, apparently you must pay $10 for every piece of spam you recieve in the box... Please correct me if you see it differently.
The Cost of Spam
sites from google and SpamCon.
"Oh... There it goes... my brain stopped" - Ed from Ed, Edd, and Eddy.
This story might provide some more info on why this is happening.
It seems the UK's largest ISP, Demon Internet, is also affected by a sudden recent surge in e-mails.
Thankfully they are keeping their customers informed through their status pages but it has resulted in us moving our mailboxes from Demon for the time being. We have seen delays as much as twenty-four hours or more.
Demon Internet released the following statement, also available in its original form here.
E-Mail is not meant to be a fast way of communication. So what if the mail takes an hour to arrive? Even if E-Mail took 24 hours to be delivered, it would *still* be better than snail mail. That doesn't mean you don't have to fight off spammers however.
Now if only they could work on the reliability of E-Mail, there's always an E-Mail you send that doesn't get received every once in a while, too often if you ask me.
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
Simply block all IP-based traffic using port 25 for a few days. Totally. The legit users won't notice the difference, and the spammers won't get through at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Spam has always been annoying - have been used to it. However, in the last few months, it seems to have become dramatically worse with the addition of viral fraudulent Microsoft patch emails.
My personal email account (that I have had for many years, and use for email list and online order / subscriptions / etc) is now averaging 80-100 items of mail a day - of which only ~10 are legitimate. This is simply outrageous.
Our IT department has spam blocking - it is killing real email too.
Estimates are now that 70% of all traffic is spam. As another poster mentioned, ISPs, especially the top-level backbone providers are stuck with a conflict-of-interest, as they profit on the sale of bandwidth, and therefore are not motivated to contain the overwhelming amount of unwanted noise clogging the Internet.
Imagine if you picked up your telephone and 70 percent of the time it was already in use?
Imagine if 70% of the time on the DVD you just purchased was filled with commercials?
Imagine if you had to put 233% more gasoline in your car than is necessary to get from one point to another?
This is the Spamedemic we are faced with, with a bunch of idiots in power who are either clueless or uninterested in addressing the problem. If this level of inefficiency were present in any other system, it would not be tolerated.
Actually the TCP/IP protocols allow for throttling commands to be send back in the ACK message that inform all the routes between the source and the destination to throttle back the traffic rate. Using this technique it should be possible to slow down some of these scans/attached to the point where they fail.
This seems to be a general problem. This morning I received about 400 spam messages that had accumulated overnight in one of my e-mail accounts. I don't ever use that address, but I do monitor it for messages from the ISP. About a week ago, I received 240 spam messages that had similarly accumulated overnight in another account--one that I use but supposedly spam-filtered. All I can hope is that skilled analysts are monitoring events and are preparing a mousetrap for the perps. Couldn't happen to more deserving folks...
The problem on Telstra's side is increased by the fact that they have no idea how to run a mail server. That's scary when you remember they have a government-started monopoly.
e pl ies
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1199?show=r
All I can say is: check out mailwasher : check out your mail while it's still on the server and choose which to bounce. ie. get on the spammer's bounce lists, and watch your spam count go down way faster than spamcop or any other alternative!
I think you underestimate the laziness of EVERYONE involved.
Example:
Light bulbs: how much energy is wasted? (around 70-90%)
Maybe that's not a fair example, because maybe that doesn't fit your definition of system.
how about this one: users who actually use those photo editing programs that come with digital cameras/scanners. I'm not sure if they've gotten better recently, but the ones that came with my parent's stuff was trash. As far as inefficiency, they use > 100 MB of RAM and cause the swapfile to pass 1GB editing a "small" full color 300x150 image at 360dpi.
Yet they still use this software because it works...most of the time, and don't mind having to reboot after every image (but they still complain to me...)...
The fact is most people don't really care about efficiency as long as something works.
There is a technology, known as teergrube that does exactly that. It slows down email from spammers, thus increasing their costs of sending spam.
Many have suggested various ways to fight back like bouncing all spam, but since most headers are forged these days, such practices just use up network bandwidth and hurt spoofed victimes. Teergrube seems to be one of the few ways to fight back that might actually work.
Now we just have to convince our ISP's to universally adopt terrgube MTA's and spam will be dealt a serious blow.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Killing one person or maiming 10?
Maiming 10 or seriously injuring 100?
Seriously injuring 100 or mugging 1000?
Mugging 1000 or verbally abusing 10,000?
Verbally abusing 10,000 or ripping off 100,000?
Ripping off 100,000 or spamming 1,000,000?
Something to think about...
Testra has been the worse offender routing table bloat in the world. Those guys are either clueless or trying to avoid having any backbone while appearing to be one. Telstra's CIRD report these guys are advertising just shy of 30k prefixes and a lot of those are /32 prefixes aka one IP address. Somebody needs to track down whoever calls themselves the network architect, engineer or admin and shoot them then show them how to advertise a prefix.
Oh yea BTW all those entra entries into the global routing table make it harder for every other router running BGP.
No sir I dont like it.
I am a telstra customer and have had a lot of problems with their mail servers in the past. They are slow, don't deliver mail regularly etc etc etc. So I run my own mail server on my cable connection and that works great until ISPs start blocking residential ip addresses. Now I am forced to use telstra's mail servers for the mail to even have a chance of getting through and then this nonsense happens. :(
I heard Russel Crowe was mad as hell (about this) and he's not going to take it any more!
He's mean when he's angry too. I read about it in premier, or entertainment weekly. It must be true.
Telstra is a big enough ISP that it could easily solve a large portion of the spam problem. All they have to do is make a few deals with other ISPs to collect deposits and fine their spamming customers and we'd see the problem go away real quick.
Of course this would only work if we allow no excuses. If someone downstream from you is sending the spam through you, tough luck. You'll be fined and it's up to you to collect from your customer if you want to be reinbursed. If your machines were hacked, tough luck again. You're still reponsible for the spam charge, and it's up to you to find the hacker, sue him or her for damages, and collect if you want to be reinbursed.
It's the George W. Bush approach to spamming. We will make no distinction between the spammers who send the spams and the ISPs who harbor them.
Ever since VeriSlime wildcarded the .com and .net domains, the amount of spam I received increased fifty-fold. I thought it was a shame this article didn't link the two events together.
.au it'd be great if VeriSlime would recompense us for this extra traffic they have caused us to pay for.
Since we have to pay through the teeth for bandwidth here in
Matt
That's just a telstra PR announcement reworded! admittedly the man has been watching the news and staying up to date, as that is the lastest excuse to roll out of the telstra PR mill. I think initally telstra were trying to sell people on the line that a bug in their mailservers artifically increased the load and forced it to start queuing mail. When that didn't fly they've pulled out the "it's not our fault, other isp's have this problem to! it's the evil spammers!"\
I hope they lose massive numbers of customers over this.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
This morning I got to work so see that a record number of spams were deleted over the weekend for my email users. I'm feeling pretty good since I just updated my spam filtering capability last week. Then the first three calls I get are from users complaining about all the spam they got over the weekend. I blocked a record number, but a record number still got through.
I'm ready to do anything to get this to stop. What would anyone recommend?
I'm currently using 3 RBLs, SAV Spam heuristics, subject line filtering and sender filtering. I'd love to find a new SMTP gateway, but I'm no 'nix guru. What would you recommend?
But why is the rum gone?
If you're certain about that, complain to the spammer's ISP. Most ISPs here (.au) have an AUP which market forces dictate pretty much has to be enforced. The ISP market is relatively small here, and word gets around quite quickly. I have known several accounts to have been pulled for this.
Though it's just as likely there's some luser out there with a broadband account and an open relay...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This earlier article blames the email problems on buggy email software that Telstra installed recently.
Thank heavens, they're only bouncing one email in ten now :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
to cover for Telstra's crappy system administration.
Fairfax are reputable now?
My take is that all this traffic is W32/Swen related.
I made the mistake of posting to USENET the other day and got a 38MB/day pay back in the form of hundreds of 145kb virus-laden spam from machine all over the world. Other people are reporting 100Mbs.
Why is Australia particularly badly effected? I suspect that when it comes down to it, the pipes between Australia and the rest of the world is smaller than the pipes between Europe and the USA or within the USA itself. So your pipes haven't been stuffed yet. Just wait!