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.

Comments

Mathematically...

[Shag]

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...

Re:Why is this news!?!

[SQL Error]

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...

Not So Fast, Sonny Jim

[SQL Error]

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...

Re:This is a good thing

[FireFury03]

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...

Re:Why is this news!?!

[MyLongNickName]

Then the French started outsourcing that "monarch overthrowing" job to the Germans.