Scammers' ISP Off The Internet... Temporarily

from the well-that's-one-way-to-deal-with-it dept

Tue, Sep 23rd 2008 11:51pm — Mike Masnick

Apparently an ISP that's got quite the reputation of being "scammer-friendly" is finding it increasingly difficult to find anyone who will provide it internet access. Its latest upstream provider finally kicked it off the internet this past weekend after receiving mounting complaints from researchers who found that 78% of the domains on Intercage's system were scammers and spammers. That's quite a lot, and says something about Intercage's unwillingness to deal with complaints directly. Though, it does raise questions about the "innocent bystanders" who make up the other 22% of Intercage's customers. Should those customers be expected to investigate who else hosts on the ISP they sign up for? Is it fair to cut them off from the internet too? In the meantime, there's always someone else willing to provide service -- and, indeed, it took all of about two days for Intercage to find itself a new provider.

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Filed Under: internet access, scammers, spammers
Companies: intercage

12 Comments

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Chunky Vomit, 24 Sep 2008 @ 1:35am

I was wondering where a giant chunk of spam went all of a sudden. It will be interesting to see if it comes back in a day or two.
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Jake, 24 Sep 2008 @ 3:05am

That kind of company is exactly why I have grave doubts about the wisdom of absolving platform providers of any responsibility for keeping their own house in order at all via the CDA safe harbours.
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Art, 24 Sep 2008 @ 4:52am

It's about time.
I think if all internet providers took this zero-tolerance approach then our internet would be less congested. I am sure that with all of these spam messages and scams that some of our troubles from the internet are directly related to these things.
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Todd, 24 Sep 2008 @ 5:06am

Close enough
The other 22% just haven't been caught yet
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spammed, 24 Sep 2008 @ 5:29am

So that's why my spam email count dropped over the past couple of days, I was wondering why it seemed so quiet. But today I woke up to the usual 8 emails in the spam box after just 10 hours of being offline.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Sep 2008 @ 5:53am

Re:
Wow, that is a neat story. Thanks, spammed.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Sep 2008 @ 6:31am

Maybe the 22% were not so innocent
They didn't *find* malware on 22% of the sites. Some of these sites may not have been under development, and some might have had malware that was not detected. I am definitely guilty of assuming guilt by association, but if I understand how Intercage worked, they did not solicit regular websites. It is unfortunate if some innocents did get swept along in this, but any small business (even brick and mortar shops)has a risk of getting swept away due to outside forces.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Sep 2008 @ 7:33am

I sense a disturbance in the Force... It's as if a million spams cried out in terror and were silenced.
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mobiGeek, 24 Sep 2008 @ 7:35am

Re:
But typically the market will take care of the problems. It takes longer than if there was a gov't regulation to invoke police action (or whatever), but in the case of a platform that allows users to abuse its service, either they will resolve the abuse or they will simply lose customers to the competition.

No one wants to be on a platform full of comments from drooling txt spk mor0ns.

And since the internet truly is a peering system, if you allow rampant stupidity, your peers begin to ignore you.
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mobiGeek, 24 Sep 2008 @ 7:36am

Re: It's about time.
Which congestion are you talking about? Other than a clogged spam filter, I haven't seen any slowdowns on the 'net in quite some time...and when I do it is typically a problem with my ISP, not with "too much traffic".
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Nick, 24 Sep 2008 @ 7:39am

Tempts me to just block their entire AS on my network!
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Sep 2008 @ 7:42am

Re:
8 spam in 10 hours? You must have another filter level between so you don't see the rest. I get that many in less than 30 seconds.
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