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Spam Blacklist Targets Hijacked Telewest Customers

Posted by timothy on from the spammers-should-be-hung-by-their-thumbs dept.

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."

4 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. SPEWS isn't a firm by kaarlov · · Score: 5, Insightful

    SPEWS is not a "anti-spam firm". Check their website at http://spews.org/ for more explanation. And anyone too conserned about false positives should do their due dilligence when picking the DNSBLs they use and notice that SPEWS blocks fairly large netblocks. And there probably will be a lot of legitimate mail sent from bad neighborhoods. SPEWS is a very good tool for blocking spam and educating ignorant ISPs, but it's not suited for everyone.

  2. Email Addresses? by Underholdning · · Score: 5, Informative

    Spews doesn't block email addresses. As a matter of fact, they don't block anything. Spews is a database of IP addresses.

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    Underholdning.info
  3. Should point out.... by Tehrasha · · Score: 5, Informative
    ..that no email addresses have been blacklisted.

    Telewest has had almost one million email address blacklisted by an anti-spam firm.

    SPEWS does not block email addresses, it lists IP addresses. Its up to admins who use SPEWS to decide whether or not to use the listing to block email coming from those IPs.

    If the users in those affected IPs use a legitimate email server, they can still send email to their hearts content. Only people running their own mail servers and direct-to-mx traffic would be affected.

  4. Re:Irresponsible to let infected machines stay onl by dlZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.)

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    rm -rf ./evidence @ punkcomp