Swedish ISP Blocks Computers That Send Spam

snuppepuppan writes "One of Sweden's largest ISPs, Telia starts to block computers that send spam. 'The computers that Telia will block are primarily those that have been infected with "trojans" which are being used, without the customer's knowledge, to send enormous amounts of spam.'"

Comments

a great idea

[batray]

If more ISPs took spam complaints seriously and acted on them quickly the net would be a better place. However it is has been my experience that abuse desks are mostly staffed by the clueless.
For me the dominant source of spam that I get now comes from infected computers, since DNSBLs have rendered fixed spaming IPs impotent.

Why is this news?

[eddy]

Telia is mostly known for their suckage over here. They've made several false starts, including blocking SMTP completely at their border making it impossible to host ones own mail server.

I guess if they've finally given up on that idoicy and actually go after the specific hosts that are a problem -- like we in the community has said for years is the correct solution -- then I'm all for it.

Just sad that it's making news the way it is. I think the news should be that they wasted at least two years reaching this "insight"!

Would be interesting to know if this was because the suits finally listened to their techs, or if it's because the techs finally gained a clue.

My work's ISP does a variation of this

[quizwedge]

We have a local ISP and we are probably his largest customer. We've had problems since he is a startup and he traced them to trojans/worms/etc. so he sent them a warning to fix their system and then when they didn't, he shut them off. It's worked very well for us, keeps the number of infections down, keeps his network up and running, and keeps people accountable for the security of their computers.

And if anyone is wondering why we're going with a startup for business, it's because the only choice between 144kbps DSL and a full T1 is this guy.

Background

[upside]

The Finnish side of Telia, TeliaSonera, has been in deep sh*t the last few weeks. Their email has been clogged up, apparently at least partly due to the fact that they have been listed in a few blacklists. Even the comms authority has intervened and told them to put their act together.

Trojanised PCs on broadband are the likely cause, and the block is most probably a measure designed to prevent such from happening again.

Leper VLAN

[Detritus]

Some Universities have an interesting way of solving the problem. Infected systems are switched to a VLAN that restricts them to accessing a web site that contains information, software and patches on how to clean up their computer.