Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Port 25 inbound blocking
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:48:55 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org> Date: February 26, 2009 6:42:07 AM EST To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Port 25 inbound blocking
Port 25 blocking, as was noted on IP last week, is increasingly being used by ISPs around the world to combat the problem of spam.
While I applaud Comcast's decision to do this, finally, it's come way, way
too late. The time to make this change was the spring of 2003, at which point the problem was extremely well-known and growing exponentially. See, for example: Rise of the spam zombies (Kevin Poulsen, April 2003) http://www.securityfocus.com/news/4217 followed a year later by Attack of Comcast's Internet zombies (Declan McCullagh, May 2004) http://news.com.com/Attack+of+Comcast%27s+Internet+zombies/2010-1034_3-5218178.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news Fixing the problem six YEARS after it became so enormous that Comcast was vying for the title of the world's largest spammer is hardly cause for celebration. Doubly so given that spammers have not been idle in the interim. By thetime that Comcast and others [1] finally get this in place, and deal with the myriad debugging and support issues, spammers will have deployed their next
tactic and will be looking forward to several more years of abuse via their operations.If Comcast et.al. are to effectively manage their networks in order to prevent them from being abuse sources, they will have to learn to respond on a scale
of hours/days, rather than years. ---Rsk [1] While Comcast is the topic here, many other ISPs around the world are in the same position. In the US, Verizon has been so badly affected that it's been quite easy to track new FIOS rollouts just by noting when the spam starts. ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Port 25 inbound blocking David Farber (Feb 24)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Port 25 inbound blocking David Farber (Feb 25)
- Re: Port 25 inbound blocking David Farber (Feb 25)
- Re: Port 25 inbound blocking David Farber (Feb 26)