word salad spam

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005, G.Waleed Kavalec wrote:
>PS
>
>In my humble opinion it is time to start pressuring the upstream big players.
>
>They conduct spam from their clients, they could detect it, they could
>put in AUPs.
>
>They don't because it makes them money and mid range players don't
>make it an issue.

Mid range players are paying much more attention with 900lb gorillas like
AOL tell them that AOL won't accept mail from their networks unless they do
something to tighten up their networks (e.g. one prominent cable broadband
provider was accounting for about a third of the zombie spam attempts to
AOL, and has since cleaned up their act at list a bit).

The biggest source of spam, DoS attacks, and general network abuse are
Owned Windows machines on broadband networks that are used as  zombie
servers to send spam and attack other's machines.

There are some simple things an ISP can do to limit abuse from their
customers.  Tops on the list is to block outgoing port 25 (SMTP) traffic
from the customer's machines except to the ISP's own mail servers unless
the customer specifically requests it so they can run their own mail
servers.

Most of our ISP customers are regionals where the ISP is only part of their
business, and they have full service computer and networking businesses as
well.  It pays them to identify infected customer machines (a) because they
don't want to be black listed as spammers, and (b) they can charge
customers to clean the worms from their Microsoft Virus (aka Windows)
systems.

...
Bill
--
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