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."

Comments

Re:it takes time and cooperation

[Peter Greenwood]

Hmmm - If

It seems to me easier to persuade ISPs than some governments (China? Brazil?). After all the ISPs are having to dig deeper into their pockets for the infrastructure to do the spammers' messages, and they aren't being paid.

If all ISPs refused to peer with spam-friendly outfits, or those hosting spammers' websites*, that would achieve the same thing.

* I don't distinguish between spammers who send bulk email and those who employ the former to advertise their junk.

Spam ruins networks; here's what spammers think

[bigberk]

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.

Spam == Terrorism?

[msobkow]

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.

Email Providers vs. Bandwidth Providers

[billstewart]

This story does appear to be about a couple of big Aussie email providers, and how their email servers are getting bogged down. Telstra and Optus are also IP bandwidth providers, but that's really a separate issue, and the article didn't say their pipes were getting bogged down (except maybe the pipes into their email servers.) Much different scale, much different set of problems and solutions.

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.

Spam is good for ISPs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.