Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes

Thu Oct 9 17:03:48 UTC 2003

At 12:53 PM 10/9/2003, you wrote:

>On 9 Oct 2003, at 12:19, Vinny Abello wrote:
>
>>Personally, I think preventing residential broadband customers from 
>>hosting servers would limit a lot of that. I'm not saying that IS the 
>>solution. Whether or not that's the right thing to do in all 
>>circumstances for each ISP is a long standing debate that surfaces here 
>>from time to time. Same as allowing people to host mail servers on cable 
>>modems or even allowing them to access mail servers other than the ISP's.
>
>"Hosting a server" looks very similar to "using an ftp client in active 
>mode", "playing games over the network" or "using a SIP phone" to the 
>network. Enumerating all permissible "servers" and denying all prohibited 
>ones arguably requires an unreasonable shift of intelligence into the 
>network. Allowing inbound connections by default and blocking specific 
>types of traffic reactively has been demonstrated not to be an adequate 
>solution, I think.
>
>A more aggressive policy of blocking all inbound connections (and 
>analogues using connectionless protocols) essentially denies direct access 
>between edge devices, which implies quite an architectural shift.
>
>I think it's more complicated than "prevent residential users from hosting 
>servers".

Absolutely, and I was just referring to certain things, not all inbound 
access. I mentioned before that it doesn't really make much sense with web 
hosting because the port can easily be changed so it's not very effective 
at all. Blocking people from hosting mail servers that receive mail and 
can't send mail directly could be enforced much more easily than the web 
example so my original thought doesn't really apply all that much to web 
stuff, but then again I stated I didn't say that IS the solution to 
anything. Just a thought that's been kicked around forever that we've all 
heard. :)

Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
vinny at tellurian.com
(973)300-9211 x 125
(973)940-6125 (Direct)
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