North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Firewall stateful handling of ICMP packets

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Thu Dec 04 11:05:31 2003

On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Joe Abley wrote:
> Live example of how well monetary pinching works in New Zealand --
> there have been cases of people receiving $15,000 monthly phone bills
> which are mainly comprised of ADSL traffic charges. So, the traffic
> charges stop the rogue traffic, by sending customers bankrupt, but only
> about a month or so after the fact.

Did news stories about this get other people in New Zealand to fix their
computers, apply patches, use anti-virus? Or were were lots of stories
about the "evil" telco ruining grandmothers and orphans? and the telco
eventually waived the charges?

Toll charges do encourage PBX owners and cordless phone makers to improve
the security of their products?  Most cordless phones (unlike WiFi) now
have automatic authentication between the handset and base (not
encryption, just authentication).  Most PBX's block outside to outside
phone connections (the telephone version of proxy/relay) by default now.


If ISPs charged customers $0.000001/email message, would it cure spam or
would the spammers just continue to use third-party victims to spam and
there would be lots of news stories about grandmothers and orphans getting
huge ISP bills?  IANAL, but many spammers are already breaking a law by
using victim machines without authorization; but would law enforcement be
more likely to do something if the victims now had a $50,000 bill from
their ISP due to the unauthorized traffic?