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Spam Slows Australian Net Traffic

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the crippling-a-land-down-under dept.

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."

3 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. This Just In by Bistronaut · · Score: 5, Funny

    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>

  2. Spam ruins networks; here's what spammers think by bigberk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Coincidence? by __aavhli5779 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.