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Spam Slows Australian Net Traffic 205

Posted by CmdrTaco from the crippling-a-land-down-under dept.
JohnPM writes "A sudden, sustained surge in traffic has slowed Australian email drastically over the past week. Spam and computer viruses are believed to be largely responsible."
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Spam Slows Australian Net Traffic More

Spam Slows Australian Net Traffic

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  • This Just In (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bistronaut ( 267467 ) * on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:12PM (#7201676) Homepage Journal

    UPDATE: Officials have tracked down the actual source of the problem. It turns out that Slashdot was linking to stories in the .au domain.

    </obviousjoke>

  • A sudden, sustained surge in traffic has slowed Australian email drastically over the past week.

    A sudden, sustained surge in traffic will slow an Australian news site drastically over the next few hours. ;)

    • A sudden, sustained surge in traffic will slow an Australian news site drastically over the next few hours. ;)
      I know you're joking, but a friend yesterday pointed out that despite theage.com.au getting several stories linked off slashdot, it's rare for those stories to ever appear in its 'top 5 most-visited articles' list. It seems we need more slashdotters to RTFA.

  • "That's not a DDOS. *pulls out Inbox*
    Now THAT's a DDOS!"

  • Coincidence? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by robogun ( 466062 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:15PM (#7201701)
    The article does not mention the amount of outbound spam from Australia. Which I have been getting a lot of lately. In fact, come to think of it, exactly in the time frame mentioned in the article.
    • "Greetings. My name is Ngaba Umbele. I am the former finance minister of, um, Australia....."
    • I have been getting Viagra spam every day over the past two weeks from a box located in AU that is hard to traceroute.

      It appears to be ending in two locations in AU and is at botterhosting.com

    • Re:Coincidence? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by __aavhli5779 ( 690619 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:45PM (#7201962) Journal
      I hate to point out that there's at least a bit of irony in Telstra whining about spam bogging down their mail servers.

      Though they're definitely not on the level of a true spamhaus, Telstra has been observed over the last few years protecting spammers on their network, including moving IP assignments for said customers to avoid blocklists.

      What I can't say is whether pink contracts at Telstra are particularly more rife than, say, those at AT&T, another notorious abuse-ignorant ISP.
      • Here's a excerpt from a newspaper article [news.com.au] I read this morning that suggests that whacky system design and a patch mentality contributed to the problems:

        Sources close to Telstra and its suppliers, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, said both vendors would come in for a grilling about the software bug, although it was mainly due to a flawed configuration strategy of installing Sun's Netscape mail software on HP hardware.

        "Telstra is always bullying behind the scenes and making life very difficult for S

    • Re:Coincidence? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RT Alec ( 608475 ) *

      I hate to sound like a broken record, but maybe these ISPs need to start seriously thinking about blocking outbound port 25 traffic (except, of course, for their own mail servers).

      Please rephrase "How dare you put a limit on my ability to run a mail server!!" to the more appropriate "I want to continue getting away with a business level of service on my consumer priced account". Also, please don't reply about how blocking port 25 will ruin the Internet-- that is not what I suggest.

      It's time we all grew up

      • I hate to sound like a broken record, but maybe these ISPs need to start seriously thinking about blocking outbound port 25 traffic (except, of course, for their own mail servers).

        The problem is that these ISPs you're hoping to come riding to the rescue are the very problem. They're helping spammers stay online by shifting them around to different netblocks to avoid blacklisting. The solution isn't to put training wheels on Internet connectivity and restrict everyone to web browsing, it's to enforce the

      • I don't think anyone has shown that UUnet has had a pink contract with any customers. If you have proof, you'd be the first. Link to this proof?
      • Please explain why wanting to run your own servers is a "business level of service".

  • Who pays for it? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:16PM (#7201707) Homepage
    Perhaps this is the best argument for charging for bandwith usage, or at least the most acceptable to Slashdotters. It gives a financial incentive to people to clean up their systems and stop being easy prey to worms and viruses, and makes them pay for the damage they cause (whether deliberately or just through carelessness and using insecure software).
    • The problem is that email is already very bandwidth efficient. Let's say that you make a very short (60 seconds at 64 kbps) phone call. That phone call used 480kB (SI) of bandwidth. That's enough for several hundred email messages.

    • Re:Who pays for it? (Score:3, Informative)

      by zcat_NZ ( 267672 )
      Aussies pay probably the highest rates in the developed world for traffic already. Sucks to be them :)

      New Zealand is slightly better, but for decent ADSL (full speed, not 128K) we pay 15c-18c per meg.

      It really pisses me off when I read stories on /. about the poor, deprived cable modem users who aren't allowed to do >1G per day on kaaza any more. My 128K adsl has a 12G per month cap and most months I don't even reach half that, even after downloading a few ISO's, the occasional movie, and a healthy amo

    • Spam == Terrorism? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by msobkow ( 48369 )

      Think about it -- the Spammers and the hackers flood the networks with garbage traffic, impacting millions of users and thousands of businesses.

      Currently over 20% of my bandwidth on a 1.5Mbit link is wasted by ping floods and other attempted attacks. We are not talking about a few script kiddies anymore, but thousands of infected nodes performing distributed attacks.

      Skip throwing the book at them, and don't waste tax dollars housing these degenerates. Flag them as terrorists for their constant attack

      • Skip throwing the book at them, and don't waste tax dollars housing these degenerates. Flag them as terrorists for their constant attacks on public infrastructures, and treat them accordingly

        Hmm, sounds like a Republican(tm) remark. :-)
        I'd think we should finally start throwing the book a them, not only the guys that run the computers but especially the owners of the shops that are trying to use spam as a viable business model.

      • Congratulations on playing the terrorist card. I could *never* get tired of *that* comparison.

        Look, ping floods, virus attacks, and 100-200 spam emails I have to sort through every day suck. It makes my job more difficult, it makes my connection slower and/or more expensive, and it generally degrades my whole internet experience, but spam isn't killing any babies. FFS, if you think Viagra adverts and mortgage rate quotes are terrorism, you need to watch some news footage of actual terrorism, where you
      • An act of terrorism is something that strikes fear into the heart of a nation or people ("terror"ism), usually for the purpose of bringing world attention to an issue - it's also not usualy an attack on important ifrastructure, or a military target.

        Blowing up a cafe, a night club, or an office block for attention is Terrorism.

        What you are describing could at most, be described as annoyism.
  • Wow!

    Now that's what I'd call *in-depth* report.. .. good thing slashdot isn't getting more technical .. it would have to be rocket science ^_^
    • Dear sir,

      We apologize for the breviity of our report, but current bandwidth situations in Australia have imposed a 15-sentence limit on all news articles. We realize that this is a break from our usual in-depth coverage and hope you will continue your patrona[[email quota exceeded, message truncated]]

  • Viruses are probably the main culprit; I don't see any reason why the volume of spam would suddenly increase.
    • It is... Ever since the Swen virus came up, there's an expotentional rise in mail traffic. It's not just Australia, it's everywhere. Even big hitters like hotmail, yahoo and AOL are being hit bigtime.
    • Considering the article was written by Gerry Barker, long known as one of our most clueless tech writers, and hot on the heels of problems with Telstra and Optus internal email while all other ISPs are going just fine... I'd say he's doing his usual shilling and putting a less "telstra/optus suck" spin on things.

      It's like if Verisign's DNS server fell over, and suddenly you had Darl McBride writing a column stating "Terrorists who write open source software are hacking the net". It's about as believable.

      G
    • I think some spammers have been infected with that Microsoft Security Update e-mail virus. I keep finding 2-10 142K e-mails in my Yahoo Bulk Mail folder for that virus daily. This has only been occuring over the last couple weeks.

      Has anyone else noticed that?

      Dastardly
      • My email is hosted by Yahoo as well, mmmm, I must say unfortunately, but they bought a few years back the little start-up that provided me good service.

        Anyway, a few weeks ago, they announced that email inboxes would be capped to 10 MB. Which is in general OK, but I complained to them, that such an inbox would fill up quickly with # messages of 142 KB per day. So, 10 MB max would be fine, as long as they would start to do some server based SPAM filtering. Even my freeby (tucows.com) email server is doing t

  • Spam and computer viruses are believed to be largely responsible.

    I read the article and I don't get it, how/why did all Australian spammers manage to send spam over the Australian network at the same time? Was there only one source for it, or many spammers did it simultaniously?

    As for computer viruses, there haven't been any viruses lately.

    And the article doesn't say anything about the reason, although ISPs can easily track down those spammers :/

    • As for computer viruses, there haven't been any viruses lately.

      I'll admit, I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, so I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt.

      For the increase in viruses, think about Sobig, as well as worms like Blaster and Welchia.

      For why there may be a link between spam and viruses, it's been widely speculated that spammers are behind many infections, as a means of relaying messages through innocent hosts to avoid themselves being implicated and having their connections cut of

  • One trend has been penis enlargement spams entitled "Enlarge Up to 3 Inches".

    If an increase up to a 3 inch total length is something that would do you good, you've really got a major anatomical problem there, mr bobbit.
  • First they let the music downloaders in [slashdot.org], then all sorts of misfits start to take over their net.
  • Spam and computer viruses are believed to be largely responsible

    i think its funny that these are put as if they are so different. almost seems that they are by nature one entity and different manifestations.....almost like some ancient egyptian religious structure of pure evil..

    xao

  • Ironic advertising... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Optus and Telstra published apologies on their websites and on voicemail because of slow delivery times.

    Ad below:

    Unlimited bandwidth with optus only $49.95 a month
  • Its something bigger than that...

    Its Chili's getting back at Outback Steakhouse for
    stealing the receipe for the Awesome Blossum!

  • Reading articles like this brings a serious question to mind: why don't ISP's monitor for suspicious behavior and sue spammers and others who cause disruption and/or damage to infrastructure by abusing resources? It's trivial to set up software to look at the rate of port 25 connections coming from an address and alert ops staff when something out of the ordinary is happening. It would almost certainly be in the best interest of the ISP to do so, because these are not people they want on their networks,
    • That does sound like a good idea, yet no one has implemented it yet. Why not? Is it actually nontrivial to monitor port 25 connections without drastically slowing down traffic? Or is it just that no one has quite figured out how to do it yet?
      • It's -trivially- easy to block port 25 and force all your customers to use the isp's SMTP servers. This makes it much easier to identify spammers, and stops many email viruses from spreading.

        A lot of ISP's already do this and a lot of ISP's block incoming mail from 'dialup/DHCP' IP pools, so even if you have your own SMTP server it's still a good idea to use your ISP's server as a smarthost.

        • Yes!!

          This is exactly what needs to be done! The only people negatively affected by this are people running mail servers on their consumer level accounts. To them-- I am truly sorry. No sarcasm there, running your own server is "cool" and does allow you a somewhat higher level of control over your "domain" than relying on your ISP's server. But this spam problem is just out of hand, and let's face it-- running a server is just not "consumer level". Sorry. Pay a little more for a business level account. And

  • Here is how much spam I get (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I took the time to set up this script the other day, and being the strange person that I am I also had saved all spam in a separate folder, so was able to graph this going some time back:

    http://www.ispol.com/home/grisha/spam.html [ispol.com]

    it's out of control, that's for sure.

  • Serves them right! (Score:4, Funny)

    by docbrown42 ( 535974 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:26PM (#7201791) Homepage
    If they would have installed the patch that MS has been emailing to EVERYONE , they wouldn't have this problem!

    By the way: has anyone noticed Windows being particularly unstable recently? (More than usual)
    </noob>
  • Did anyone else note that this started about the same time as the DO-NOT-CALL list took effect in the USA?

    Maybe they just getting the overflow from the telemarketers.

    [beat others to silly joke]

    1. Do not call takes effect in USA.
    2. Spam Australia.
    3. ???
    4. Profit!

    [/beat others to silly joke]
  • this article reads like it was written by a junior highschool 'journalism' student. it has no content. why bother to post this? really?
    • this article reads like it was written by a junior highschool 'journalism' student

      This is slashdot. You're not supposed to read the article.
    • Its theAge, one of australia's least professional news outlets. I'd be surprised if any of their employees ever even took a 'journalism' course in their lives. If they were to hire a junior highschool student, the content would be significantly improved.

      They do have plenty of tits and teeth photos, though, which makes it palatable to the average aussie male. The ghost of Murdoch lives on.

      the AC
  • I assume the slowdown has to do with recent attempts to implement RFC8829 [127.0.0.1] which has to do with using koala bears to route data packets through an intricate network of eucalyptus trees. In attempts I've seen, this results in the koala bears eating the root DNS and then falling asleep.
  • Studies show that an increase in the volume of traffic in LA County highways has lead to more congestion and longer commute times and slower driving. Profound!

    Well, except when O.J. is driving. Then it's just slow driving.

    Seriously though...WTF? Duh.

  • E-Mail (Score:2)

    by rf0 ( 159958 )
    This is where procmail comes in handy to just drop anything that hits the server and not DOS dialup lines. OK its not perfect but it helps cut down traffic slightly

    Rus
  • Here's an idea off the top of my head. Build a new protocol, specifically for sending Spam. Then, the spammers can't complain about their "freedom of speech" rights, and network administrators can simply turn off this source of network usage whenever they like.

    Simple as that?

  • Spam ruins networks; here's what spammers think (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:37PM (#7201894)
    It's nice to increasingly see these types of news stories reported in the media. It impresses upon people the cost of spam -- administrative expense, increased bandwidth usage, lost productivity, etc.

    Yet would you believe that spammers themselves think they're not doing anything wrong? Many of them, like this guy [google.com] think they're legitimate business people. They think there is nothing immoral, destructive, or un-neighborly about spam.

    And you think it's just a weird coincidence that virus traffic and spam are both on the rise? This lends more credibility to the growing concern among mail administrators, myself included, that spammers are setting up major worldwide spam injection networks using viruses.
  • Does their evil know no bounds?
  • This just in: the internet is actually slowing down because of a large volume of traffic on IP ports. Experts say, IP ports are like freeways -- the more cars, the more it slows down.
    One U.S. expert said: "Australia is so far away -- and there are no exits along the way!"
    so true, so true. :)

  • Email Providers vs. Bandwidth Providers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @04:04PM (#7202091) Journal
    This story does appear to be about a couple of big Aussie email providers, and how their email servers are getting bogged down. Telstra and Optus are also IP bandwidth providers, but that's really a separate issue, and the article didn't say their pipes were getting bogged down (except maybe the pipes into their email servers.) Much different scale, much different set of problems and solutions.

    If their usual 30 million messages/day goes up 20%, and the average message is 10 KB, that's an extra 60GB/day (* 8bits/byte / 86400 sec/day) -> 5.5 megabits/second. So they need an extra 3 E1 lines, or half a slow Ethernet. In practice they'd need more, because it's not spread out evenly across the day, but it shouldn't be killing them.

    Now, Telstra always had the reputation of being the developed world's most data-clueless telco, with a stupidity and greed level similar to the US cable modem companies.... But even so, this shouldn't be that much strain on them as a bandwidth provider.

    • Telstra (Score:3, Interesting)

      by silas_moeckel ( 234313 )
      Testra has been the worse offender routing table bloat in the world. Those guys are either clueless or trying to avoid having any backbone while appearing to be one. Telstra's CIRD report [cidr-report.org] these guys are advertising just shy of 30k prefixes and a lot of those are /32 prefixes aka one IP address. Somebody needs to track down whoever calls themselves the network architect, engineer or admin and shoot them then show them how to advertise a prefix.

      Oh yea BTW all those entra entries into the global routing ta
      • Oh, yeah... I can read too...

        If you go down to the Aggregation Summary [cidr-report.org], and click on the link for 30217 AS1221 ASN-TELSTRA Telstra Pty Ltd [cidr-report.org] you would notice that their 30k advertisements include:

        Current: 30217
        Withdrawn: 29289
        Aggregated: 205
        Reduction: 29084
        Leaving Announces of: 1133

        Which is a 96.25% reduction on their previous announce list!

        Not that I think they're good for anything, but complaining after they've cleaned up their act is kinda childish, don't you think?

  • Spam is good for ISPs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Boycott ISPs that charge for email traffic.

    Boycott ISPs that do not provide IMAP and require you to POP3 all Newest MS Patch crap.

    Boycott ISPs that refuse to block well-known spam sources.

    Spam will never stop until we stop ISPs profiting from it.

  • Simply block all IP-based traffic using port 25 for a few days. Totally. The legit users won't notice the difference, and the spammers won't get through at all.
  • Spam has always been annoying - have been used to it. However, in the last few months, it seems to have become dramatically worse with the addition of viral fraudulent Microsoft patch emails.

    My personal email account (that I have had for many years, and use for email list and online order / subscriptions / etc) is now averaging 80-100 items of mail a day - of which only ~10 are legitimate. This is simply outrageous.

    Our IT department has spam blocking - it is killing real email too.
  • Estimates are now that 70% of all traffic is spam. As another poster mentioned, ISPs, especially the top-level backbone providers are stuck with a conflict-of-interest, as they profit on the sale of bandwidth, and therefore are not motivated to contain the overwhelming amount of unwanted noise clogging the Internet.

    Imagine if you picked up your telephone and 70 percent of the time it was already in use?

    Imagine if 70% of the time on the DVD you just purchased was filled with commercials?

    Imagine if you ha
    • Mabu's solution to the Spamedemic:

      1. Form a new enforcement agency that is dedicated to cyber crime. Populate the agency with well-trained IT people who know the laws and the nature of the problem. This agency does not need to encroach into areas covered by US Customs or the FTC (i.e. not be concerned with the content of spam, but merely focus on computer/network-tampering/exploitation. The FBI is not adequately equipped to fight cybercrime. A new agency separate from the other law enforcement organiza
      • Another interesting idea about the SMTP whitelist system is that with such a facility in place, it would be much easier to track the source of viruses and worms. A centralized whitelist network could identify the earliest source of virus contamination and therefore make it much more efficient to track down the perpetrators.
  • This seems to be a general problem. This morning I received about 400 spam messages that had accumulated overnight in one of my e-mail accounts. I don't ever use that address, but I do monitor it for messages from the ISP. About a week ago, I received 240 spam messages that had similarly accumulated overnight in another account--one that I use but supposedly spam-filtered. All I can hope is that skilled analysts are monitoring events and are preparing a mousetrap for the perps. Couldn't happen to more deser
  • The problem on Telstra's side is increased by the fact that they have no idea how to run a mail server. That's scary when you remember they have a government-started monopoly.

    http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/1199?show=re pl ies

  • Telstra is a big enough ISP that it could easily solve a large portion of the spam problem. All they have to do is make a few deals with other ISPs to collect deposits and fine their spamming customers and we'd see the problem go away real quick.

    Of course this would only work if we allow no excuses. If someone downstream from you is sending the spam through you, tough luck. You'll be fined and it's up to you to collect from your customer if you want to be reinbursed. If your machines were hacked, tough

  • actually, Telstra broke their mail software (Score:3, Informative)

    by danny ( 2658 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:24PM (#7203247) Homepage
    See this story from Friday, BigPond e-mail slow down fixed [zdnet.com.au].
    Telstra has revealed the reason for the e-mail delays many of its customers have experienced over the last two weeks.

    Some BigPond customers have experienced diminished incoming mail performance, with messages often being delayed by several hours or more. Telstra spokesperson Kerrina Lawrence told ZDNet Australia the problem was with a software upgrade recently implemented by Telstra.

    I know spam is a problem, but I'm not convinced it's become any worse in the last few weeks - it may just make a convenient scapegoat to distract from Telstra's screwups.

    Danny.

  • This morning I got to work so see that a record number of spams were deleted over the weekend for my email users. I'm feeling pretty good since I just updated my spam filtering capability last week. Then the first three calls I get are from users complaining about all the spam they got over the weekend. I blocked a record number, but a record number still got through.

    I'm ready to do anything to get this to stop. What would anyone recommend?

    I'm currently using 3 RBLs, SAV Spam heuristics, subject line filt

  • This report [news.com.au] mentions a 20% traffic spike, but also refers to critical email problems dating from two weeks ago.

    This [smh.com.au] earlier article blames the email problems on buggy email software that Telstra installed recently.

    Ms Lawrence said yesterday the software problems had been resolved and 90 per cent of emails were "getting through first time around".

    Thank heavens, they're only bouncing one email in ten now :-)

  • As seen on whirlpool [whirlpool.net.au]
    :

    I've just checked the mail server logs on several of our filter servers (we operate a service which filters spam and viruses out of our customers' email), and it definately looks like Telstra have sorted out at least their incoming email.

    We've got several thousand email customers who use BigPond, and our servers queues were clogging with huge amounts of email destined to extmail.bigpond.com -- mostly, our connection attempts were being refused. For most of the day yesterday (the 11

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