North American Network Operators Group

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Re: net.terrorism

  • From: William Allen Simpson
  • Date: Wed Jan 10 19:04:54 2001

"Timothy J. Salo" wrote:
> Well, it sounds like an operational issue.
> 
> As described in the original post, a group is disrupting Internet
> connectivity to some destinations to achieve certain policy objectives.
> This has a number of adverse implications.
> 
And goes on to list somewhat irrelevant issues, none of which are 
applicable in this case. 

Look here -- we are talking about violation of "acceptable-use policy" 
(AUP for short).  In this matter, we are talking about harm to our 
operations (specifically, our mail servers). 

Now, last year, we had virus problem(s) -- remember?  And that virus 
queried a web site for its update -- remember? 

I don't know what you folks did, but I had my staff quickly hand code 
an addition to the access lists, and apply it to every POP router 
in our net.  And then, I called my upstreams and asked that they add 
a block in front of us.

I'm sure that some users were confused by any badly worded notices 
in their MUAs about lack of connectivity.  But not as many as would 
have complained that mail was down!

And I'd rather that it was pain on irresponsible third parties, than 
on my support staff.  That costs money.

I'd be willing to bet that site is still blocked in our lists.  I've 
never checked.  And it may not be the sites' fault that irresponsible 
users targeted the site for the virus update.  But the effect will 
last for a long long time.

The ORBS sites were frequently polling my mail servers.  It costs 
bandwidth and processing time.  

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