North American Network Operators Group
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Re: How should ISPs notify customers about Bots (Was Re: DNS Hijacking by Cox)

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Mon Jul 23 13:23:55 2007

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: 
What should be the official IETF recognized method for network operators
to asynchronously communicate with users/hosts connect to the network for
various reasons getting those machines cleaned up?


Most large carriers that are also MAAWG members seem to be pushing
walled gardens for this purpose.

Walled gardens also block access to external IRC servers.

On a network protocol level, walled gardens also contain things like fake DNS servers (what about DNSsec), fake http servers, fake (or forced) NAT re-writing IP addresses, access control lists and lots of stuff trying to respond to the user's traffic with alerts from the ISP.

Although there seems to be a contingent of folks who believe ISPs should
never block or redirect any Internet traffic for any reason, the reality is stepping into the middle of the user's traffic sometimes the only practical way for ISPs to reach some Internet users with infected computers.

But, like other attempts to respond to network abuse (e.g. various block lists), sometimes there are false positives and mistakes. When
it happens, you tweak the filters and undue the wrong block. Demanding zero chance of error before ISPs doing anything just means ISPs won't do anything.