How should ISPs notify customers about Bots (Was Re: DNS Hijacking

Mon Jul 23 20:26:42 UTC 2007

On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 02:48:05PM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
> 
> > On 7/23/07, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
> > > All right, here we go.  Please explain the nature of the bot on my freshly
> > > installed (last night) FreeBSD 6.2R box.
> > 
> > %age of freshly installed freebsd 6.2R boxes v/s random windows boxes
> > on cox cable?
> 
> That's fairly irrelevant.  The fact is that this isn't targetting infected
> boxes, it's targetting everyone.

its relevant because you specified freebsd and hence it becomes necessary to consider what % of users have freebsd boxes and how many of those are infected

> > Like anything else, its a numbers game.
> 
> All of computing is a numbers game.  That doesn't make it right to go around
> breaking random services just because it might fix some random problem.

"right" .. whats that then? you're buying a product, you have T&Cs, you are protected by consumer law.. what moral of society is being breached for it not to be "right"?

and neither the services are random or the problem. they are quite specific and the solution has been calculated to be the path of least resistance for the whole.

you sound a lot like a consumer more than a network operator.. i'm not saying i would like what cox do if i were a consumer of theirs but they are dealing with an issue on their subscription service and they dont seem to be doing anything particularly radical

do you have a better suggestion for them?

incidentally, if you are a consumer and a tech-savvy one, why dont you just circumvent the restriction?

Steve