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

This Just In

[Bistronaut]

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>

Coincidence?

[robogun]

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.

Re:Coincidence?

[Sneftel]

"Greetings. My name is Ngaba Umbele. I am the former finance minister of, um, Australia....."

Re:Coincidence?

[__aavhli5779]

I hate to point out that there's at least a bit of irony in Telstra whining about spam bogging down their mail servers.

Though they're definitely not on the level of a true spamhaus, Telstra has been observed over the last few years protecting spammers on their network, including moving IP assignments for said customers to avoid blocklists.

What I can't say is whether pink contracts at Telstra are particularly more rife than, say, those at AT&T, another notorious abuse-ignorant ISP.

Re:Coincidence?

[RT Alec]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but maybe these ISPs need to start seriously thinking about blocking outbound port 25 traffic (except, of course, for their own mail servers).

Please rephrase "How dare you put a limit on my ability to run a mail server!!" to the more appropriate "I want to continue getting away with a business level of service on my consumer priced account". Also, please don't reply about how blocking port 25 will ruin the Internet-- that is not what I suggest.

It's time we all grew up. ISPs need to realize that there is a serious price to pay for allowing spam to proliferate. Yes, it is their fault-- from the infamous "pink contracts" of UUNet, PSI, and others, to the just plain dumb policy of allowing egress TCP port 25 traffic.

Who pays for it?

[Ed Avis]

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).

Re:Who pays for it?

[zcat_NZ]

Aussies pay probably the highest rates in the developed world for traffic already. Sucks to be them :)

New Zealand is slightly better, but for decent ADSL (full speed, not 128K) we pay 15c-18c per meg.

It really pisses me off when I read stories on /. about the poor, deprived cable modem users who aren't allowed to do >1G per day on kaaza any more. My 128K adsl has a 12G per month cap and most months I don't even reach half that, even after downloading a few ISO's, the occasional movie, and a healthy amount of pr0n.

Here is how much spam I get

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Serves them right!

[docbrown42]

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>

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.

Telstra

[silas_moeckel]

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.

actually, Telstra broke their mail software

[danny]

See this story from Friday, BigPond e-mail slow down fixed.

Telstra has revealed the reason for the e-mail delays many of its customers have experienced over the last two weeks.

Some BigPond customers have experienced diminished incoming mail performance, with messages often being delayed by several hours or more. Telstra spokesperson Kerrina Lawrence told ZDNet Australia the problem was with a software upgrade recently implemented by Telstra.

I know spam is a problem, but I'm not convinced it's become any worse in the last few weeks - it may just make a convenient scapegoat to distract from Telstra's screwups.

Danny.

Plus an infrastructure problem?

[xixax]

Here's a excerpt from a newspaper article I read this morning that suggests that whacky system design and a patch mentality contributed to the problems:

Sources close to Telstra and its suppliers, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, said both vendors would come in for a grilling about the software bug, although it was mainly due to a flawed configuration strategy of installing Sun's Netscape mail software on HP hardware.

"Telstra is always bullying behind the scenes and making life very difficult for Sun and HP and Sun-owned Netscape," one source said. "The method has been not to actually fix things but to patch them, and not think about the long term."

Xix.