Comcast's War On Infected PCs (Or All Customers) 304
thadmiller writes "Comcast is launching a trial on Thursday of a new automated service that will warn broadband customers of possible virus infections if the computers are behaving as if they have been compromised by malware. For instance, a significant overnight spike in traffic being sent from a particular Internet Protocol address could signal that a computer is infected with a virus, taking control of the system and using it to send spam as part of a botnet." Update: Jason Livingood
of Comcast's Internet Systems Engineering group sent to Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mailing list a more detailed explanation of what this trial will involve.
More Phishing (Score:3, Informative)
Over under on new phishing e-mails is about 2 seconds.
From: Comcast
To: Joe Usar
NOTICE: Your computer has been infected
To who it may concarn:
Please be to aware that your computer has been infected by virus. Please click here and verify your payment information so we can authorize removal of your viruses. If you do not your account blocked!!!!
Re:OH, They have been acting for a while! (Score:4, Informative)
> No, but why is the NAT firewall letting the spam through to the outside world?
Because having egress filtering on by default would piss off most users, so consumer NATs don't do that.
I count myself lucky... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nice try. (Score:2, Informative)
A co-worker of mine recently had his service terminated because he had exceeded 1TB of downloading in a month. I'm not sure if this is a regional thing, but that seems like a really high cap. Ultimately, he called them and the solution was to upgrade to a business class connection. It ended up costing him an additional $20 (iirc) a month, but he now has a higher upstream and a static IP. He was cool with that as it seems this works out better for him anyway, but any sort of cap for an advertised unlimited service is a bit ridiculous.
Not likely since they had announced (october 2008) that their monthly cap was 250 gigs a month. If it was recently then there was a serious problem where he was breaking their TOS for nearly a year.
Re:Seems fine to notify (Score:3, Informative)