Scam-Linked ISP Intercage / Atrivo Gets Shut Out

alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World: "The lifeline linking notorious service provider Intercage to the rest of the Internet has been severed. Intercage, which has also done business under the name Atrivo, was knocked offline late Saturday night when the last upstream provider connecting it to the Internet's backbone, Pacific Internet Exchange, terminated Intercage's service. Intercage president Emil Kacperski said Pacific did not tell him why his company had been knocked offline, but he believes it was in response to pressure from Spamhaus, a volunteer-run antispam group, which has been highly critical of Intercage's business practices."

Comments

Re:So, a drop of spam-traffic?

[gnick]

Yup. The end of TFA was the painful (albeit obvious) part:

Kacperski said Monday he was looking for a new service provider, but that he had no idea how long it will take him to get back online.

"I've got to basically start all over," he said.

Ugh. And the sad part is that, while he's scrambling to rebuild his "business", other people will be scrambling to fill in the void.

Re:That's why!

[oldspewey]

You're just going to go right ahead and buy penis enlargement pills with the money? You're not going to parlay it into something bigger first? I got an email just this morning informing me that SuperRoyalCasinoOnline.com is offering a 200% bonus on all deposits. That means you can buy three times more penis pills, with the potential for even bigger winnings.

beside spam

[ionix5891]

they used to host quite alot of warez, and their whole range is blocked on wikipedia...

Re:Spamhaus, really?

[xrayspx]

They list netblocks in a blacklist that other people use to filter, and if an ISP doesn't deal with the issue with that one block, Spamhaus will threaten to expand beyond the block of the individual offender, which might be like a /27, and blacklist the ISP's block, which might be a /18 or something.

If a whole ISP is seen as a habitual offender and providing safe haven to unrepentant spammers, then SpamHaus will work their way upstream.

Emil Does know why they were disconnected.

[geohump]

Email discussion about this modern version/equivalent of the "Internet Death penalty" (IDP) has been ongoing in the email list for network operators for the past several days. One side's consensus in this case seems to be "Intercage/Atrivo" has been a problem for years, has never adequately responded to abuse complaints, and is responding with a protestation of innocence that has all the credibility of 'The check is in the mail", "I'll only put it in an inch", and "of course I love you".

There is the other side of the story with protestations of innocence. Unfortunately those cries are exactly what any party, guilty or innocent, would make. How to tell the difference?

And what next?

Will more ISP's/Hosters refuse to do business with "questionable" parties? Doesn't seem likely, but we can hope. Will the IDP be used on any other parties? Will there be damage to innocent parties? There are no easy answers or ready solutions for this issue.

Re:Emil Does know why they were disconnected.

[cpghost]

Will more ISP's/Hosters refuse to do business with "questionable" parties?

Some parties are always considered questionable, e.g. when they actively disrupt the Net. Those parties have always been cut-off, even in the pre-IP times: a misbehaving USENET host was quickly blacklisted and it had a very hard time to find peers. This is "technical questionability".

Other parties are sometimes considered questionable, e.g. when they provide content that is deemed questionable in some areas and cultures (say, e.g. pr0n). This is "social/cultural questionability".

Cutting someone off because of technical reasons is absolutely justifiable, because not cutting him off would disrupt the system itself. Cutting someone off because of social/cultural reasons is not necessary from a technical point of view, and is open to political debate.

Now, Net Neutrality is essentially a political (and economical) debate, and has nothing to do with the first category (technical constraints). Cutting off Intercage/Atrivo seems to me like belonging to the first category: they were actively disrupting the Net on the technical level, and they had to go. IMHO.

Re:So, a drop of spam-traffic?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a couple of hours?

For a day. They found a new upstream now, though, Unitedlayer, Inc., who obviously didn't pay any attention to the news (or just decided to ignore it):

http://cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS27595

            27595 INTERCAGE - InterCage, Inc.

                Adjacency: 1 Upstream: 1 Downstream: 0
                Upstream Adjacent AS list
                    AS23342 UNITEDLAYER - Unitedlayer, Inc.

Re:It's a slippery slope...

[eli867]

Uh, authentication isn't the problem. The bad guys are running the mail server, not hacking into it.