North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes

  • From: Vinny Abello
  • Date: Thu Oct 09 13:11:39 2003 
At 12:31 PM 10/9/2003, Joe Boyce wrote:
Thursday, October 9, 2003, 9:19:37 AM, you wrote:



VA> Personally, I think preventing residential broadband customers from hosting
VA> servers would limit a lot of that. I'm not saying that IS the solution.
VA> Whether or not that's the right thing to do in all circumstances for each
VA> ISP is a long standing debate that surfaces here from time to time. Same as
VA> allowing people to host mail servers on cable modems or even allowing them
VA> to access mail servers other than the ISP's.

It's not like those customers are aware they are hosting servers, they
most likely were exploited and are now unaware they are hosting
websites.
Yes, that was kind of my point, although as a co-worker pointed out, many spamvertised sites run on alternate ports so I guess that wouldn't really matter all that much anyway. So it wouldn't help if an unknowing host was hosting a web site on port 37241 which was sent as a link in spam... http traffic can of course (as I'm surprised nobody's pointed out yet) run on a myriad of TCP ports just like practically any service. Maybe going back to securing broadband networks would help somewhat as well... Of course everything boils down to the end user which is what I've always believed in, but end users will not likely change in the way they run their computers. Network operators often times have to take some of these issues up by enforcing a policy for the good of the customer. I'm still not saying that is RIGHT to do in all circumstances, but it's an option that logically would reduce some (not all by any means) of the problems out there with people having owned machines.

Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
[email protected]
(973)300-9211 x 125
(973)940-6125 (Direct)
PGP Key Fingerprint: 3BC5 9A48 FC78 03D3 82E0 E935 5325 FBCB 0100 977A

Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection
http://www.tellurian.com (888)TELLURIAN

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those that don't.