word salad spam

[A. Khattri]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Bill Campbell wrote:

> 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.

As someone who sits on the other side of the fence (I work for an ISP), we
often see zombie PCs hosting phish sites or acting as spambots. We usually
inform the customers immediately and tell them to deal with it or be
disconnected.

There seems to be some opinion that the ISP bears more responsibility than
the customer, but you could also point to customers that get infected
again and again and do nothing about updating their OS, getting better
anti-virus solutions or simply installing a firewall.

You could also point to M$ for making a shoddy product in the first place.

We have one customer that run their own mail server and keep getting
blacklisted because of spam. They keep getting infected (and we tell them
this) and they dont take any preventative measures. Now they want to move
to another IP block as if that will cure the problem - how do you deal
with that attitude?

I think we are very responsive (and responsible) as an ISP but customers
need to clean up their act too.



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