Comcast trying to battle home spammers

In an interesting new move, Comcast blocks port 25 - but apparently only on select accounts which are suspected of spamming.

"We are singling out spammers on our network and blocking port 25," said Mitch Bowling, Comcast's vice president of operations. "We don't think it's the right approach to blanket port 25. The right approach is to seek out people who are spamming our network and others."

This is to take action both on those that are actively and knowingly running SMTP servers from home and also those that are running "zombies" - PCs which unknowingly are running malware that is sending out spam from their machine. The latter is really the main target here since they are so prevalent. The former is interesting because many broadband providers will tell you that you aren't allowed to run servers on their networks... although they might not actively enforce that unless you are causing a bandwidth issue.

There are still multiple ways around this, but they are annoying and costly enough that one would have to be fairly proactive in doing so - something that existing malware isn't going to do. It is essentially just a dumb program spitting out information that it is given to pass on. It doesn't know about other ways of doing it.
That said, eventually malware will likely take this into account as well.

One more step in the cat and mouse game - but considering that the article says that 665 million e-mails come from Comcast everyday - not all of which is spam, but at that volume it will be great to see a reduction.

Posted by Eric at June 10, 2004 09:36 PM | TrackBack