SPEWS blacklists UK users
p2pnet.net News:- More than 900,000 British Telewest customers have been blacklisted by SPEWS, the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, “in response to the high number of Telewest customers whose machines have become compromised and taken over for the purpose of sending spam,” says silicon.com.
“Last month silicon.com revealed that some of Telewest’s blueyonder.co.uk home users were sending hundreds of thousands of emails each day – a sure sign of an open relay, pumping out spam,” says the story, continuing:
“At the time, Matt Peachey, MD of IronPort, whose Senderbase system revealed the extent of Telewest’s spam problem, told silicon.com: ‘The ISPs know they’re spamming but they’re reluctant to put things in place which block mail. With ISPs it’s not about what comes into their networks, it’s about what goes out’."
Peachey is quoted as saying there are around 17,000 IP addresses on the blueyonder.co.uk domain “which are pumping out spam” and yet the SPEWS blacklisting applies to more than 900,000.
"This is why blacklists are so problematic," said Peachey. "There will be a lot of people who are blacklisted who have been doing absolutely nothing wrong."
Australia’s largest ISP, Telstra BigPond, recently disconnected “Trojan-infected customer PCs” which it said had caused a flood of malware on its servers.
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See:-
silicon.com – Spam blacklisting for one million Telewest customers, May 10, 2005
Trojan-infected – Oz’s BigPond disconnects users, p2pnet, April 12, 2005
May 10th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
Let the ISP complain all it wants. Maybe if British Telewest customers cannot send out email, Telewest will instutute default email port blocking to all servers except their own. This would be a much easier solution to implment rather than tracking down each user whose computer is infected by malware.
I also take a different approach. For spamvertised websites hosted in China, I link them to outlawed organizations. I have put up several links to Falun Gong on a domain that has been spammed. I then ask widely about Falun Gong information on the spamvertised websites, and I complain via email about my favorite “Falun Gong” website being replaced by a dodgy site selling ….
My theory is if the Chinese government continues to refuse to police spamvertised sites, then they need a new motivation. In the meantime, maybe the actual Falun Gong movement might catch a break for a while. Other methods for spam fighting include http://www.plaza1.net/SpamFryer.jar and http://www.plaza1.net/spammerslammer.cgi
I have declared WAR on spammers and their clients. If I could get away with it, I would hunt them down and kill them like the vermin they are. Unfortunately, due to the public’s lack of ethusiasm, I am fighting this battle with only a few allies. I just wish that more people would use the tools I provided (or any attack tool for that matter). Spam will not stop untill we start punching back rather than holding our arms in front of our bodies. A good offense is the best defense.