CNN.com – E-mail providers: Unplug spam-sending PCs – Jun 22, 2004
Consumers who allow their infected computers to send out millions of “spam” messages could be unplugged from the Internet under a proposal released Tuesday by six large e-mail providers.
That seems a bit draconian, especially since it will affect so many users (all those Windows users).
Looks like Comcast has a better idea: they can manage their network, if not the nodes on it, after all.
The biggest spammer on the Net? Comcast? – News – ZDNet
Comcast’s high-speed Internet subscribers have long been rumored to be an unusually persistent source of junk e-mail.
Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. “We’re the biggest spammer on the Internet,” network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week.
[ . . . ]
IronPort Systems’ statistics for comcast.net show that while the company’s six official mail servers have a monthly outgoing e-mail index of 6.2, there are at least 44 Comcast subscribers with similar scores of 5.8 or higher. Overall, Comcast is the single biggest source of all types of e-mail, with a higher volume than the next two, Time Warner’s Road Runner and Yahoo, combined.
[ . . . ]
Based on my conversations last week, Comcast’s network engineers would like to be more aggressive. But the marketing department shot down a ban on port 25 because of its circa $58 million price tag–so high partially because some subscribers would have to be told how to reconfigure their mail programs to point at Comcast’s servers, and each phone call to the help desk costs $9.Instead, Comcast’s engineers plan to try the innovative approach of identifying the zombie PCs and surreptitiously sending the subscriber’s cable modem a new configuration routine that prevents outbound connections on port 25. Zombie-infected users won’t even notice, the thinking goes, because most people use Comcast’s mail servers for outgoing e-mail. Anyone wrongfully blocked can call and complain.
Elegant and effective. Now if they can go back and figure out a way to do the same thing for nimda and similar crap . . . .