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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."
Who Is Pamela Jones?
By Maureen O'Gara
Friday May 6, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.
The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.
Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.
Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.
See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.
Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.
Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.
But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."
He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."
She was also missing and had been for weeks.
Nobody there knew where she was.
She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.
Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.
The woman at the house, Barbara Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.
Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.
Odd, the subject of my stories - or any stories - never came up during our brief interview. I was just looking for Pamela.
That left Pamela's son, Nicolas Richards, who, as it happens, had been in the software business in Manhattan until - why, my goodness - things seem to have come a cropper right around the time Groklaw came into existence.
Nick and his ma were apparently involved together in Medabiliti Inc, an ISV, because one Pamela Jones with a Westche
Fuck you bitch. I quit because colege is boring. They've dumbed it down so much that the average slashdotter is to smart to attend. Theres no point going.
haha, you wasted years of you're life, while I'm earning seven figures sys-adminning.
Almost one million net addresses owned by UK cable firm Telewest have been blacklisted by an anti-spam group.
The Spam Prevention Early Warning System blacklisted the addresses because many of the machines using them have been hijacked by spammers.
The army of remotely-controllable machines have probably been recruited by viruses and worms.
Telewest said it knew about the problem and was working with customers to regain control of their home computers.
Home invasion
The blacklists produced by the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (Spews) are used by many organisations as a way to filter e-mail.
When an e-mail message arrives, the net address it is sent from is checked against the list. The message is blocked and deleted if it has been sent from a known spam address.
This blocking by net address has become more important as malicious hackers and cyber criminals have started recruiting home PCs to act as proxies and send out spam on their behalf.
We are currently contacting affected customers to help them clean their PCs which, as you can imagine, is a time-consuming task
Telewest statement
Some of the so-called zombie armies can include thousands of machines.
PCs on cockband connections are coveted by spammers as they tend to stay online longer and have more bandwidth to use for sending mail.
In late April, Spews announced that it had started blocking more than 900,000 net addresses used by Telewest's Blueyonder broadband service. Many were suspected of being used by spammers.
In a statement Telewest said: ""We are aware of the increase in e-mail volumes due to customers' PCs which have been infected by worms and viruses."
Telewest blamed recent virus outbreaks for the sudden rise in the number of hijacked home PCs.
"We are currently contacting affected customers to help them clean their PCs which, as you can imagine, is a time-consuming task," it said.
Telewest also said it was working on a more permanent solution to problem by installing security systems within its network.
It added that later this year it will also make a package of PC protection measures available to Blueyonder customers.
Big problem
Blacklists were a very blunt tool to tackle the problem of zombie computers, said Matt Peachey, European director of Ironport software which monitors net addresses to spot which ones have been hijacked by spammers.
Mr Peachey said Spews tended to block big chunks of net addresses rather than the few within that range that are actually spamming.
"I would challenge the idea that all the net addresses they are blocking are spamming," he said.
Spammers tended to frequently change the PCs they use to send junk mail, said Mr Peachey, which can mean lists go out of date quickly.
Ironport's own statistics, gathered on its Senderbase website, show that currently more than 16,000 computers on the Telewest network had an e-mail engine installed.
Most of those were likely to be hijacked home PCs, said Mr Peachey, because officially Telewest only runs nine servers that route e-mail for its customers.
One hijacked PC on the Telewest network was sending out more than 100,000 e-mail messages per day, he said.
Many other net service firms were struggling to control the armies of hijacked PCs on their networks, according to Mr Peachey.
You could even put a bounty on them!
Geh, my bad. So many acronyms of so many blacklists.
And so few brain cells, apparently.