Slashdot Mirror
Spam Blacklist Targets Hijacked Telewest Customers
davidmcg writes "BBC.co.uk reports that UK cable firm Telewest has had almost one million email address blacklisted by an anti-spam firm. The Spam Prevention Early Warning System blacklisted the email addresses because a large number of the machines using them have been hijacked by spammers. Telewest have stated that they knew about the problem and have been working with customers to regain control of their machines."
Seems Telewest are actually attempting to rectify this situation, although you have to wonder how it is their responsisbilty.
FTFA: One hijacked PC on the Telewest network was sending out more than 100,000 e-mail messages per day, he said.
In cases like these if the offending computer is cleaned with (insert time frame here) then perhaps some negative reinforcement should be considered. fines etc???
serenity now!
Telewest is probably no worse than any other.
for a medium size ISP 16,000 machines spewing crap is a huge issue.
my humble, unimportant opinion is that the users themselves should be responsible for making sure their computers are safe
I run the AHBL and I am a firm believer in this. You are responsible for your car on the highway, you are responsible for the actions of your children if you have them, and you should be responsible for the damage your computer does to the public network. Currently in the open-proxy and comp-sys-ddos (obviously compromised machines) we have listed over 1.3 million machines. I honestly think that we can do better than to have 1.3 million machines which have been responsible for spewing crap since the inception of the AHBL 2 years ago.
About three years ago a usenet death penalty was issued against Telewest. Before it came into force they stopped all messages spreading out from their main newsserver and began scanning their customers for open newsservers and open proxys.
When my cable company had any issues with spam from any of their customers, they simply cut off their internet until the customer had their computer fixed. Seems easier than what this cable company is going through. User can either pay to have their computer cleaned and secured, or do it themselves. They then advise the Cable company to put them back on. Lot better for every other customer who is responsible enough to maintain their PCs.
Yes, if that is what it takes to get their attention. Many ISPs adopt an "it's not my fault" approach to users abusing their networks, and anybody who runs any kind of mail server without taking steps to secure it is guilty of abuse.
Similarly, in this day and age, there is no excuse for users not to know that their machines have been zombied. The simple fact is that unless they are running reliable firewalls or anti-virus programs, they already will have been zombied. I know it is possible to secure a Windows box, but most OEM installations are left totally insecure, and a majority of people never change their computer settings once the machine is on or under their desk.
- these customers' PCs were infected
- they were (at least about to be) hijacked
- the users were unaware or incapable of fixing the problem, i.e. it was demonstrably out of control for the systems' owners.
With 3+ GHz CPUs, 512-1024 MB RAM, 300+ gigs of HDD and on a 3+ Mbit/s broadband connection, every ISP knows that off-the-shelf PCs can still appear to work under an amazing (crap)load today, and they have more potential to wreak havoc than entire major companies or universites a decade agoNone of them had ever received that call from their providers (which could even be automated to some extent):
I get quite a few machines from Road Runner customers that have received a notice and had their service turned off until the machine was fixed. One customer told them she fixed it (she didn't, was using all Macs) and had her service turned back on, just to be almost immediatly turned off until she had proof from some sort of tech support it was fixed (it wasn't her machines... It was her open wireless router and her clueless neighbor who just connected to whatever popped up first.) I had to fax over a letter on my companies letterhead to have her service turned back on once her router was configured properly.
Have never seen one from a Verizon customer locally, though (RR and Verizon are pretty much the only two providers you see used around here.)
rm -rf
The current way of spamming is not to use Port 25 ... the spam-bots run the spam out through the ISP's mail server, JUST LIKE THE CUSTOMERS! A spam-bot sending 100-500 emails an hour, 24x7, doesn't sound like much until you figure out how many spam-bots Comcast has. I get spam from comcast ... enough spam that I whitelisted a couple of people and /dev/null the rest.