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Comcast's War On Infected PCs (Or All Customers)
thadmiller writes "Comcast is launching a trial on Thursday of a new automated service that will warn broadband customers of possible virus infections if the computers are behaving as if they have been compromised by malware. For instance, a significant overnight spike in traffic being sent from a particular Internet Protocol address could signal that a computer is infected with a virus, taking control of the system and using it to send spam as part of a botnet." Update: Jason Livingood
of Comcast's Internet Systems Engineering group sent to Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mailing list a more detailed explanation of what this trial will involve.
Over under on new phishing e-mails is about 2 seconds.
From: Comcast
To: Joe Usar
NOTICE: Your computer has been infected
To who it may concarn:
Please be to aware that your computer has been infected by virus. Please click here and verify your payment information so we can authorize removal of your viruses. If you do not your account blocked!!!!
> No, but why is the NAT firewall letting the spam through to the outside world?
Because having egress filtering on by default would piss off most users, so consumer NATs don't do that.
...that they called and told me that I had a zombie PC. I run updates, antivirus software and am very careful about where I go on the web, and what I download. Despite all my precautions, though, my PC got infected via an infected CD from my office (autorun is now turned off, btw). I got a call from Comcast saying that they'd noticed some odd traffic. The tech guy said it looked like my PC had been infected although it didn't seem to be actively sending/receiving any unusual data. After a quick re-scan with my antivirus software, it was gone, and all was right with the world (well, my tiny corner of it, anyway). I was used to Comcast sucking hardcore before this happened. Now my attitude is a little better toward them -- the Comcast tech guy knew his stuff, and was very helpful.
- Jack
A co-worker of mine recently had his service terminated because he had exceeded 1TB of downloading in a month. I'm not sure if this is a regional thing, but that seems like a really high cap. Ultimately, he called them and the solution was to upgrade to a business class connection. It ended up costing him an additional $20 (iirc) a month, but he now has a higher upstream and a static IP. He was cool with that as it seems this works out better for him anyway, but any sort of cap for an advertised unlimited service is a bit ridiculous.
Not likely since they had announced (october 2008) that their monthly cap was 250 gigs a month. If it was recently then there was a serious problem where he was breaking their TOS for nearly a year.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
gmail SMTP uses TLS so the port is different anyway. There is nothing wrong with 25 if you make sure you get login details first. POP before SMTP has been standard for years.