[H-GEN] Re: questionable practices

[Sandra Milne]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

At 09:18 07/04/2003 +1000, you wrote:
>[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
>[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
>Sandra Milne <silne at optusnet.com.au> moved upon the face of the 'Net and 
>spake thusly:
>
> > It was an accident that I didn't pick up until I asked a friend to
> > portscan me. I was very surprised though that he could see that I had
> > open ports and OptusNet had never sent us an email about it.
>
>They're looking for WWW, IRC and $FILE_TRADING_PROTOCOL_DU_JOUR
>servers, all of which can soak up the entire "upstream" bandwidth of a
>cable segment.  There are probably so many windoze boxen with random
>ports open due to ignorance (duh, what's dee enn ess?), that alerting
>every user to their (relatively benign) open ports is pointless.

They chose to alert us that we had a virus on our network about 6 months 
ago. Well actually they said we were engaging in questionable activities on 
our connection and suggested a virus scan. We found 2 variants of the 
subseven trojan on my fiance's computer. He now doesn't download files off 
the internet. They pass through my computer which has the virus scanner 
installed.

> > they portscan us for our own 'protection'
>
>Yeah, like they care if you get owned.  The reason for this (and the
>bandwidth caps) is that one warez dude can bring a cable segment to
>its knees.


That would be the case if upstream wasn't capped to 128kbps. It's hard to 
bring a cable segment to its knees at 16k/s.

Sandra.
silne at optusnet.com.au 


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