Unflattering comments about ISPs and DDOS

Tue Dec 7 02:01:20 UTC 2004

Since Comcast allows spamming (doesn't do anything to stop it) people
should start spamming the phones at the help desk and let them know
about the spam on their network. Although - two wrongs don't make a
right.

Best Wishes,

Blake L. Smith
XtremeBandwidth.com, Inc.
949-330-6400 Office
949-606-7100 Fax
www.XtremeBandwidth.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Rich Kulawiec
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 4:19 PM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Unflattering comments about ISPs and DDOS

On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 04:56:49PM +0000, Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
wrote:
> And if enough people clean up the bots on their network,
> then a case can be made for depeering (or severely damping)
> networks that don't clean up their act.

Agreed.

But few, if any, will "clean up their act".  For instance, consider:

	http://news.com.com/2102-1034_3-5218178.html

which is a news story discussing the enormous number of spam-spewing
zombies
on Comcast's network and which says (in part):

	"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."

Since Comcast has elected not to pay that hypothetical $58 million
dollar price tag, see if you can guess who is.  Those costs (whatever
they are) don't just evaporate into nothingness merely because Comcast
isn't picking up the tab.

Please note that since then, they've begun doing *some* port-25
blocking:

	http://news.com.com/2102-1038_3-5230615.html

But I can't find any evidence that they're doing anything other
than reactively blocking port 25 connections based on some usage
threshold.  And of course that's purely symptomatic treatment for the
problem-of-the-moment: it doesn't cure the disease, doesn't un-zombie
the zombies and thus it lets them do anything/everything else they want.

---Rsk