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Major Aussie ISP Disconnecting Trojaned PCs
daria42 writes "Australia's largest ISP, Telstra BigPond, has started disconnecting customers that it suspects have excess traffic-causing trojans installed on their PCs. The trojans have been flooding BigPond's DNS servers and causing extremely slow DNS requests for around a month now. Despite nightly additions of DNS servers, BigPond appears to be unable to cope with the extra traffic on its network." Note that the article says the disconnections are temporary and accompanied by communication with the affected customers, not just a big yanking-of-carpet.
if BIGNUM% of PC's are malware-infested (I've heard 80% tossed around) and they get disconnected, suddenly anyone who's looking at their web logs will think that an unusually high number of Big Pond users are on Linux boxen, Macs, etc.
If more ISPs did this, maybe we'd see a decline in sites that only work in MSIE...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
is that "(excess traffic)-causing trojans" or "excess (traffic-causing) trojans"?
i.e. can you get kicked for having only one trojan, or is there a threshold ?
1) Patent: {thing}
2) Patent: {thing} on teh intarwebs!
3) Patent: {thing} in Australia!!
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
I bet they emailed the customers about the problem. Telstra rocks!
The French overthrew their monarchy some years back.
Yeah, in 1792, but in a typically French fashion, they had to do it again in 1814, then in 1815, once more in 1830, and yet again in 1848 and then several times during the 1870's.
Then they tried to bring it back in 1946, but no-one could agree on who got to be King, so they ended up with President de Gaulle...
I work for a phone company here in Oz, and among other things we resell Telstra ADSL.
I've seen Telstra claim that a customer on a 512/128 line (512kb/s down, 128kb/s up) uploaded 4GB in 20 hours. When I pointed out that this was impossible, they suggested that maybe the user's computer had been infected by a virus - and insisted that I check this before they would investigate.
I then spent some time explaining the concept of arithmetic to the Telstra support desk...
Eh? port 25 is for SMTP servers, a user has no need for this port unless they are running their own mail server. Checking your mail is done through POP3 and IMAP on ports 110 and 143, respectively.
Err.. yes... how exactly do you send mail if you don't use SMTP? Oh that's right, you use the email-over-telepathy protocol...
http://blog.nexusuk.org
We have disconnected your computer from our network because we have reason to believe your computer is infected with a virus, causing serious network problems.
Please scan your computer for virusses by going to the following website address....
Then the French started outsourcing that "monarch overthrowing" job to the Germans.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Trojans and malware are a normal part of free software. Do you really expect to get something for free? Are you saying we shouldn't install freeware any more? I didn't think so. What the hell is with this "DNS" anyway? I'm sure glad America Online doesn't force that on me. Anyway, if they did have it I sure wouldn't request it. I think I've got some spray that would take care of it, but I don't need that hassle. No fuckin' thanks!
--- What?