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

Spamhaus, really?

[ThanatosMinor]

I thought they were pretty much a passive organization that just lists domains and companies that are either irresponsible or actively take part in spam- or malware-related activity. It feels a little disingenuous to claim that they pressured a provider to drop a client.

Some truth to it...

[SanityInAnarchy]

That's a good point, but when companies like AOL use Spamhaus, it means a huge number of email accounts are going to drop mail from anything in that list immediately.

So while Spamhaus does "passively" list people there, let's not fool ourselves -- when they update that list, they cause people to be blocked. If an entire ISP is blocked from communicating with most email accounts out there, then that ISP is going to feel the pressure.

Re:Some truth to it...

[geohump]

Spamhaus was not the central issue or cause of the disconnection. If you read the article, you will see that there was a paper that was researched and published with regard to Intercage/Atrivo activities. The fact that I/A ended up on Spamhaus was simply a reflection of their activities. Not the cause of their disconnection. The network operators who each independently made a decision to not accomodate I/A traffic did so based on the merits of their own knowledge, some of which came from that paper and the rest of which came from their own experiences, and a tiny bit coming from spamhaus which, as noted elsewhere in this thread has a reputation of its own. (good and/or bad. )

Re:How is this different from net-neutrality?

[frosty_tsm]

Differences:

Comcast does it secretly, Pacific did it publicly (or at least, obviously).
Comcast targets a lot of individuals, Pacific cut off a provider who couldn't / wouldn't police their network.
Comcast has the public's hate. Pacific is seen as doing the public a favor.

Not saying these are valid reasons, but they are reasons to contemplate. There are probably more that I didn't think of.

Re:Emil Does know why they were disconnected.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Well, there's the 10+ years of evidence of lots of spam and viruses originating from there, spammers continuing to operate after multiple abuse reports were sent in, spammers operating from different IPs in the same range after the owner said he disconnected them, and very little evidence of any legitimate traffic from the same place. If this is the place I'm thinking of, it has no known customers, no public advertising presence, and has had a blank website for two years, yet they send out a lot of traffic and seem to make a lot of money.

It used to be that if anybody was caught sending any spam or virus traffic, you shut them down until their traffic was clean. What Pacific is doing to Intercage is far from extraordinary. It was standard practice in the mid-1990s before spammers started bribing the big telcos to give them safe connections. It is still supposed to be standard practice, but money corrupts.

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