Anti-spammers fed up with ExciteAtHome's blasé efforts to prevent unsolicited emails are threatening to block messages coming from the cable Internet provider.
The company's AtHome networking group is the latest ISP threatened with a Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) for repeatedly failing to keep spam from flooding Usenet newsgroups. ExciteAtHome has until 18 January to clean up its act.
Considered a last resort, a UDP is issued by the frustrated voluntary group of network administrators and spam fighters after months of complaints fall on deaf ears.
An ISP has five business days to respond to the death penalty warning. Should the provider fail to act, a message is sent out to every ISP that all Usenet postings from the offending ISP are to be deleted, whether they're spam or not.
"It does apply pressure on the provider to do something, often in instances where nothing is being done," said David Ritz, a Milwaukee resident and one of the many spam-busters who has called for UDPs in the past.
"The solutions are not easy, they are quite technical, and it will cost them some money, but it won't cost them as much money as bad publicity will cost them," Ritz said.
UDPs will continue to be used to get the attention of management, he said.
"The grunts at the lowest level are aware of the problem but can't get the attention of management," he said. "[Only] the threat of [a UDP] will get their attention."
In this case, it worked. ExciteAtHome officials posted a note on news.admin.net-abuse.usenet, a Usenet newsgroup where the UDP was first discussed. The posting stated that due to improperly installed proxy software, its subscribers were turned into relay conduits for spam, and spammers took advantage of the faulty configuration.
Most of the AtHome abuse comes from "open" proxy servers.
Normally, AtHome news servers are only accessible to AtHome subscribers, but an open proxy server means anyone can connect to it and use it to post messages on Usenet.
"As of today, we are stepping up our involvement and taking more aggressive action by performing frequent network-wide scans of our customer base to target proxy servers," wrote David Jackson, manager of network policy management at ExciteAtHome, in Mountain View, California. "We are committed to promoting better AtHome participation on the Usenet, and we are in the process of modifying our current news product and news architecture."
Ritz is cautiously optimistic. He plans to request that the UDP be given an extension of two to four weeks to give ExciteAtHome time to implement all of the things it needs to get control of the problem. "I believe they are taking this extremely seriously," he said. "I hope AtHome will come out of this as a respected member of the community, which it should if they do what's necessary."
Ritz is part of a team of spam fighters, whom he describes as overworked, "underslept," and volunteer.
"Every one is working very hard to put themselves out of a job. There's nothing they'd like more than to not be needed," he said.
To activate the death penalty, the groups send out cancellation messages that are replicated across Usenet news servers to delete messages identified as spam.
Usenet is the pioneering message board system of the Internet for open discussion of any and all subjects. In recent years, Usenet has been abandoned in favor of message boards on Web sites for a number of reasons, spam not the least of those reasons. One of the worse spammers Ritz ever saw posted 120,000 messages in a 24-hour period.
Ritz said the top three current offending sources for spam are AtHome servers, and that 25 percent of all traffic from AtHome's news servers is spam. To qualify as "spam," a message has to be posted to 20 or more newsgroups.
The extremely effective UDP has been issued against America Online, CompuServe, Erols.com, TIAC, BBN Planet, and Netcom, according to the UDP FAQ.
In every case, the ISP dealt with the problem before a UDP was issued. The worst offender was UUNet, which had no acceptable use policy and did not respond to months of complaints. At the time the UDP was issued in 1997, 40 percent of all Usenet traffic was spam, much of it originating from UUNet.
To make their point, in early 1999 the spam busters took a week off and allowed the spam to flow freely. The end result was news servers all over the world suddenly filled up, causing disk-full errors.
"This was so dramatic it had the single greatest effect on reducing the volume of spam," said Ritz, who claimed it also increased support for UDPs. "Admins became aware of just how desperate and drastic the condition was."
