Slashdot Mirror
Australia's Largest ISP Redefines Spam
cpudney writes "According to this article in NEWS.com.au, Telstra BigPond, Australia's largest ISP will monitor its customers' e-mails and suspend the accounts of users suspected of sending spam, viruses or denial-of-service attacks. Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam. Previously, BigPond's definition of spam was held to be 400 messages sent over a 15-minute period and now it's changed to 20 e-mails over 10 minutes. Internet Society of Australia president Tony Hill said BigPond's new definition of spam was very restrictive and he was concerned the limit had been set too low for legitimate e-mail users."
I hope they at least contact the user before shutting off service. I can think of many legitimate reasons to send 20 e-mails in 10 minutes. My adress book has many times that, and sending a CC to a fraction of my adress book would trip this.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Why is BigPond trying to identify a spammer from just 10 minutes of traffic. Or even just 15 minutes? I would think it would be much better to have a metric like 1000 emails in a single day. Or 10,000 emails over a week?
I can very easily go through 20 emails in 10 minutes just because I might be having one of those back-and-forth email conversations. I don't know if I could do 400 in a 15-minute period, unless I was running a mailing list (well, which I do, but that's why I use "personal" business ISPs).
This sort of metric just seems extremely silly. Is someone putting pressure on BigPond, or is one of their executives being an idiot?
It's been reported that SpamCop is paying upwards to $30K / year for bandwidth as a direct cause of the continous DDOS attacks on it.
The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.
And while all this is going on, the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to counter the clearly illegal acts of the spammers.
And ISPs are doing NOTHING to reduce the number of zombies on their networks. So the DDOS attacks continue.
Nice going.
It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
This is probably common with all huge Telco ISPs the world over but I think that Bigpond themselves could do more to prevent tides of Spam originating from their customers... I think these mega ISPs have a "CPE" attitude that's left over from their Telco division - i.e. If it's beyond the equipment we provide - it's "Customer Premises Equipment" and we therefore, don't care.
Bigpond could install heavy default firewalling (especially ports 80 and 25) to protect against people who install default operating systems with Christmas tree options or are infected with spamware so they readily become spam relays and force customers to use ISP provided gateway servers. Better yet, ask customers to knowingly switch off their ISP firewalling if they're providing a legitimate Internet service. (and therefore prove that they know what they're doing)
The end days of open-slather unfirewalled broadband accounts for "Mum and Dad" Internet users is long overdue.
The conspiracy theorists claim that because Bigpond charges customers per Mb for both incoming and outgoing traffic, they really don't care if their customers are open-proxy spam relays because they'll be hit with a bill for the traffic "they've" used at the end of it. That's probably extreme, it's more than likely that they just don't care or have the technical/human resources to do anything about it...