Scam-Linked ISP Intercage / Atrivo Gets Shut Out 102
alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World: "The lifeline linking notorious service provider Intercage to the rest of the Internet has been severed. Intercage, which has also done business under the name Atrivo, was knocked offline late Saturday night when the last upstream provider connecting it to the Internet's backbone, Pacific Internet Exchange, terminated Intercage's service. Intercage president Emil Kacperski said Pacific did not tell him why his company had been knocked offline, but he believes it was in response to pressure from Spamhaus, a volunteer-run antispam group, which has been highly critical of Intercage's business practices."
So, a drop of spam-traffic? (Score:4, Insightful)
For a couple of hours?
Re:Spamhaus, really? (Score:4, Insightful)
While they don't do anything active, threatening to add you to their list for being the upstream of someone on their list is a little like saying "hey, nice knees. Shame if something happened to them". Enough people use Spamhaus, directly or indirectly, that being on their list can be equivalent to actively blocking them. It's not exactly a Usenet Death Penalty, but it'll cramp your style.
Re:Spamhaus, really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Spamhaus, and most of the other anti-spam lists, are essentially boycott organizers.
They may not do much personally, but they are advocates for action.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
How is this different from net-neutrality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, for the record I am happy they are offline, but the devil's advocate in me does make me wonder about impact of this on net-neutrality.
Consider this, a bandwidth provider cuts off certain traffic because it disproves of this traffic and feels most of it is illegal and it is bad for their business.
Is it Pacific Internet Exchange cutting off access to Intercage because they believe most of the sites (70+ %) involves spam or some other illegal acvitivy?
Or is it Comcast cutting off access to P2P protocols because they believe most of it (98+ %) involves copyright infringement or some other illegal activity?
I am all for getting rid of the spam and malware, but something about this method is setting off red flags.
Or maybe I am over-thinking it.
Re:It's a slippery slope... (Score:1, Insightful)
SMTP is not the problem.
Authentication between sender and receiver doesn't belong in the envelope, and you can already do this using GPG or x509 certificates; however, this doesn't help spamming at all because you have to be able to send to people without having to know them first.
Authentication between MTAs is also already possible using SASL; however, again, that doesn't help much because spam often comes via trusted peers, and you can't exclusively only accept mail from peers that you know before hand (see above).
The one thing we can do is prevent header spoofing by making sure that mail comes from where it claims to be from using using domain keys or the like.
Overall, spamming is a socioeconomic problem. There is no technical solution other than trying to shift the cost of spamming from the receiver to the sender.
Re:That's why! (Score:5, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia ________
The economy bails you out?
this was long coming (Score:4, Insightful)
A bit over a week ago Brian Krebs, who writes the "Security Fix" blog in the Washington Post, went public [washingtonpost.com] with a number of allegations about Atrivo and its activities. As a result, many of Atrivo's own upstream connectivity providers disconnected them.
Re:That's not really fair (Score:3, Insightful)
It worked the way it was supposed to! This is one reason why some misguided "neutrality" proposals fail -- they would prohibit blocking spammers.
The whole idea is that you're not allowed to host spammers or malware. If you do, your ISP is kicked off. If some ISP provides you with upstream, they are kicked off. Anybody who hosts spammers directly or indirectly is kicked off, taking their customers with it. Not nice to customers, but customers should not sign up with spam-friendly ISPs.
Free market law of the jungle, maybe, but the only way to prevent "pink contracts" from spreading.