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Verizon Accused of Helping Spammers By Routing Millions of Stolen IP Addresses (spamhaus.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Spamhaus, an international non-profit organization that hunts down spammers, is accusing Verizon of indifference and facilitation of cybercrime because it failed for the past six months to take down stolen IP routes hosted on its network from where spam emails originated. Spamhaus detected over 4 million IP addresses, mainly stolen from China and Korea, and routed on Verizon's servers with forged paperwork. Spamhaus says, "For a start, it seems very strange that a large US-based ISP can be so easily convinced by abusers to route huge IP address blocks assigned to entities in the Asian-Pacific area. Such blocks are not something that can go unnoticed in the noise of everyday activity. They are very anomalous, and should call for an immediate accurate verification of the customer. Internal vetting processes at large ISPs should easily catch situations so far from normality."
Illicit gains > anticipated cost of getting caught? Proceed to fuck everyone.
That an ISP is being duped into routing stolen IP's so easily!
Come on, this is Verizon we are talking about here. They don't hire the sharpest knives in the drawer and so they managed to collect a little bit of cash believing the paperwork provided by their customer? Collect the fees, route the IP and should the real owner of the address finally show up and complain, keep the fees, say your are sorry, remove the route and move on to the next prospective customer throwing money at you. Seriously, what's Verizon's incentive to go out of it's way here?
So, these folks want to try and play the "Shame on Verizon" card now? Yea, good luck with making anything change. Verizon doesn't shame that easily or they'd be changing their consumer business practices too..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
IMHO Verizon is right up there with Comcast in being one of the most despicable companies in the US. They bought spectrum from the FCC promising to keep it "open" but don't approve non-Verizon devices until tons of "testing" that can take a year. They are the ones who started fighting any net neutrality. And then they (according to this post) enable spammers. Because as a huge ISP, paying attention to real technical details might be too....time consuming and profit-leaching...
A few years ago, Verizon employed some to the best people in the best people in the world to handle network and routing security. They were very responsive to reports of address hijacking and related issues. Those folks have all left Verizon since they bought UUnet, though the rush for the door didn't start until about 4 years ago.
This all happened about the time I left the operational world and started moving into retirement, so I don't know the people who replaced them, but I am sure that, if they were replaced at all, that the new people were not of the caliber of those who left.
As is often the case, network security seems to have been declared a low priority at Verizon. after all, it does not make them any money. Of course, if they become known for bad security, it could have an impact on the bottom line at some point.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
That's not the corporate shield. The corporate shield protects minority stockholders (I think less than 10% of the stock) from liability. The executives, board, and majority stockholders are protected by the much simpler approach of nobody caring to prosecute them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.