Comcast Port 25 Blocks Result In Less Spam

Dozix007 writes "Ars Technica reports that: 'After Comcast finally owned up to the massive amounts of spam coming from their network, they decided to identify spammers and zombie relays on their network and block port 25 traffic from those IP addresses. Comcast's efforts are starting to pay off. They announced the amount of spam from their network has dropped 35 percent since they began port blocking and traffic estimates from SenderBase seem to confirm the claims. Spam coming from Comcast subscribers who were formerly on AT&T networks also seems to have decreased'."

Comments

But For How Long?

[gbulmash]

Those numbers are all really nice, but isn't this just putting one of those little dot band-aids on a stab wound? It seems to work for a while, but how long before the spambot authors come up with a way around the port 25 block? How long until new worms are traversing the net, creating worldwide bottlenecks, pinging out from newly zombied PCs to find the latest Windows vulnerability and install themselves?

Better yet, what if these zombied spambot-infected PC's have been creating a shadow P2P network so their makers can quickly and easily install patches, or send out network-wide commands to their armies of zombies? How long will the port 25 block remain effective then?

I give Comcast all sorts of kudos for doing something to try to staunch the spam spurting from their digital arteries, but I don't see this working in the long term.

- Greg

Disable their Internet connection

[mikeg22]

I don't see the problem here. These machines have been *hijacked* so there should be no issue cutting them off from the internet if not for the internet's sake, than for the sake of the owner of the computer! I mean, if the machine has been comprimised, there could be a keylogger running just as easily as a spambot program. Pull the damned thing off the internet and tell the user to fix their machine. If they don't know how to do this, charge them $20 for a technician to come out there and run adaware, S&D, etc...or offer to send them these programs on a CD through the mail or for pickup at the ISP office.

There is no excuse for not securing your computer. If people don't want to take the half hour it takes to learn how to download and run adaware, S&D, and/or an antivirus program, they should NOT be allowed to connect to the internet. Is this so unreasonable?