Slashdot Mirror
Savvis Grudgingly Get Savvy About Spam
ElvenMonkey writes "The BBC is reporting that Savvis has finally promised to ditch those accounts that are using its network to send spam, in an effort to reduce the damage already done against its reputation; the CEO promises that all such accounts will be closed within 10 days (working days?) Amongst these accounts are believed to be the majority of the top 150 worst spammers worldwide."
You can go to Savvis.net for the official spiel or try http://www.savvis.info/ for the truth.
But it makes me wonder if this was more of a move of desperation for Savvis. On the surface, sure - they were threatened with what amounts to a permanent blacklist. But even then.
This sig no verb.
With how slow their site is responding, I wonder if they're responsible for sending out that much spam in reality -- or maybe their connections are just flooded with the stuff.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
This only happened after Savvis was told that their entire network was about to be e-mail blocked.
[Rob McCormick] disputed the figure of $2 million a month revenue from the spammers, and said the actual figure is only a tenth of that amount.
Which is to say, they bill $2 million, but spammers, being spammers, only pay 1/10th.
Can't help but how much that has to do with botting the lying thieves, and how much is the threat to block their entire network.
I worked at a major competitor (big company) of these guys for a while. Almost 50% of hosting revenue came from Porn. They were great customers. Seldom complained. More often than not, paid full price for bandwidth, and always paid their bills on time.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Thank god! I run a webhosting buisiness and I frequently get huge amount of spam from Savvis ip ranges. The spammers 'poked the eye of the sleeping dragon' so to speak and now that it is 'awake' the dragon is finally taking out the spammers who plauge our inboxes day in and day out. I run spam assassin and its still not killing all the spam I receive so this is a step in the right direction. Though I fear spammers may just move to other companys or another account on Savvis. Hopefully it does not come to that but it just may in the looming months.
At first I saw the name `Savvis', and I'm thinking, never heard of them before, who's that? Then I saw the mention of C&W in the article and the light went on -- "Oh, Clueless and Witless! It all makes sense now!"
There is a spellbook here; eat it? [ynq]
There is a good saying - if you steal one penny you are a thief. If you steal one billion you are a banker.
Similarly, what is unacceptable for a mom and pop garage shop ISP is perfectly acceptable for a Tier 1 or a larger Tier 2 ISP. If they decide to make a business from hosting SPAMmers (and some do) there are very few means to fight them.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Start to? Porn is how SAVVIS got its start. I worked for them for the worst few months of my career. Everything at savvis.info is true and more. The SEC would be interested in some of the scuttlebutt I heard, and things I saw are very actionable for breach of contract. Funny thing about the hosting/managed services business though, breaching your contract does so much damage to the customer company that they're usually forced closer to bankruptcy than to suing you.
Why not turn spammers information over to the Florida AG office. They're itching to try out our new spam law, and besides, with all the damage from the hurricane outbreak here, the state could use the money.
My girlfriend and I had just bought 28 acres to open a nursery next spring, and found a large oak across the only building on the property. It was an old frame structure, and not worth much, but now we have to buy something for an office. Too bad I couldn't get some of the spammers fines to buy a new building.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
That they find another unethical ISP that doesn't mind taking money from thieves(I doubt that they "earned" most of their money legally, they use viruses in order to spread their crap, they use open proxies on compromised machines to hide themselves, etc), will turn a blind eye to illegal activities(i.e. ThePlanet.com ignores reports of fake bank and phishing sites), and the ISP is ok with having their IP range blacklisted to hell.
He disputed the figure of $2 million a month revenue from the spammers, and said the actual figure is only a tenth of that amount.
It's not worth $2m/month for the bad publicity, how much less then $200K/month. That doesn't make sense. If you're only making $200K/month, little over $1000/spammer/month, then dump them. Why is this even being discussed?
Do you have ESP?
Of course, they fully supported the "marketers" who bought space from them. But they were against spam.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
(From the "this is news?" department):
Found on their website
The following general actions are considered "abuse" and are strictly prohibited:
Using SAVVIS networks to transmit material that SAVVIS believes to be illegal, obscene, or inappropriate.
Forging of message headers or identity information, or taking any action with the intent of bypassing restrictions or limits on access to a specific service or site. This prohibition does not restrict the legitimate non-commercial use of pseudonymous or anonymous services.
Falsifying identity or contact information (whether given to SAVVIS, to the InterNIC, or other parties).
And found elsewhere on the same page, specifics against "spam e-mailing." That pretty much covers the actions of those who are using the system to send out unsolicited commercial e-mail.
I believe that Savvis ought to be made to completely reveal to the authorities and the Internet Community the identities, home and work addresses and telephones of those persons identified with the sending of UCEs. That might take 10 days, though it should not.
Of course that means I'll get less pr0n in my in-box....
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I can't say I blame them. As a business, your goal is to legally make money. You only act to cut off your clients when it effects your bottom line.
There's two ways of thinking of this... from the comsumer point of you (the reciever of spam) and the business point of view (Savvis). I'd do the same thing if I was running their company.
00101010
I thought it was common knowledge that most spam comes from the US. http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/
As the others said, it's a matter of baby vs. bathwater. People (usually) don't just block all of China because there are some spammers there, they block all of China because there are some spammers there and they don't expect to receive any valid email from China. While there may be a huge amount of spam coming from the US, most of their valid email is probably coming from the US also. It simply wouldn't make sense to block the entire US. It would be the equivalent of an email filter that deletes all of your mail, because most incoming messages are spam.
There are some admins/RBLs that do block huge sections of the internet for any spam. These people take the collateral damage approach. Their plan is to interfere with the ISP's legitimate emails enough that the ISP decides it's in their best interest to terminate the spammer. For example, blocking any mail from any AOL server, because one AOL user sent some spam. In my experience, these tend to be the angsty types who are doing it more as revenge than as an actual anti-spam tool. There isn't much effort put into validating the blacklist info or keeping it updated.
What SPEWS and similar services do is blacklist people, and users of the blacklists can decide whether to use the blacklist to block incoming messages, or whether to use it as weighting in systems like SpamAssassin. I fairly commonly see SpamAssassin ratings that say "X points because it's in blacklist1, Y points because it's in Blacklist2, Z points because it's matches the Nigerian_3 pattern, N points because it's ALL YELLING", etc.
SPEWS does have a reputation for being overzealous, and blacklists that are way overzealous get ignored by users, or given a low SpamAssassin weighting or whatever, as opposed to more conservative and responsible blacklists. But that's a choice you can make.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I absolutely agree with this approach; it would definitely put a dent in spam profitability. But when it starts happening, they will move to foreign servers anyway to make prosecution a lot more difficult. But when U.S. internet providers threaten to cut off connections to all of the aforementioned countries, which they could do without a problem, then those countries will start taking the anti-spam fight seriously.
Another method of financially hurting spammers, which the government could start doing anytime they wanted to, is the Al Capone style of prosecution. Get them for tax evasion. I highly doubt that spammers report all of their income to the government. There's probably a bunch of general business laws they are violating, in addition to the fact that a lot of what they advertise for is blatantly illegal. The government doesn't need new laws to crack down on spammers, they need to enforce the ones we already have. When word gets around that spammers are being hauled into court, the others will stop soon.