Spam Slams Sympatico

[megman]

I am a Sympatico subscriber in Canada, but this scenario could happen anywhere!!!!!

Spam is slowing down e-mail all over the world, but subscribers to Canada's Sympatico Internet service seem to have been particularly hard hit.

The recent arrival of two Trojan viruses — programs that allow spammers to hijack and use individual computers to spread their-millions of pieces of e-mail — have kept Sympatico busy fighting the problem and upgrading its e-mail servers.

Don Blair, a spokesman for Bell Canada, which owns Sympatico, agreed there is a problem, and said that it's affecting the entire Internet, not just Sympatico. But representatives of at least two other major Internet service providers, Rogers Communications Inc. and Telus Corp., say they have experienced little or no slowing of service recently.

Sympatico users have been complaining in newsgroups and bulletin boards, as well as e-mail sent to Globetechnology.com, that their messages have often taken several hours to reach their destinations, and that sometimes they don't even reach their recipients at all. Some have even received several copies of the same e-mail.

Peter Costanzo, Sympatico's director of product management, laid the problem at the feet of two viruses that arrived in August, called SoBig and Swen. The two infected a particularly large number of computers connected to the Sympatico system, and turned them into spam-spewing e-mail servers, often without the owners' knowledge.

Once such viruses get behind an Internet provider's e-mail servers, they can infect thousands of other unprotected machines on the same network within minutes.

Although the viruses can be cleaned with anti-virus software and their effects nullified with Internet security software, a significant number of people have not bought or installed such precautions, and their computers have gummed up the e-mail system, Sympatico says. The result is that since August, the daily volume of e-mail going out of the Sympatico system has jumped by an average of 100 per cent.

Still, the first complaints about slow e-mail service only started appearing on Sympatico's internal user newsgroups on Oct. 10. The complaints reached a peak Tuesday, the day Globetechnology.com staff started receiving puzzling error messages for e-mail sent to Sympatico addresses.

The company had its hands full in late summer, when it was intercepting as many as 500,000 infected messages a day, Mr. Costanzo said. The company has managed to cut the number dramatically, he said, but the number now is "still significant."

At the peak, the number of Sympatico subscribers with infected computers was enough to "relay" as many as five million spam messages a day. The number has been cut down to about half that, he said.

"We try to educate our customers how to self-diagnose problems," he said. "We post notices about free security patches and links to Microsoft to close security issues. We also strongly encourage the use of antivirus products."

Sympatico has installed Brightmail software on its e-mail servers to filter out spam. It also has a system that notifies the company when subscribers' outgoing e-mail reaches a certain threshold. Sympatico then contacts the users by phone, alerting them to the infection and recommending procedures for disinfection.

But that's a long and tedious process. Moreover, it can't kick in until a computer starts to spit out spam, which may be contingent on when the user turns on the computer.

Sympatico has also increased its "several dozen" e-mail servers by 35 per cent, and plans to increase the number by another 35 per cent soon, it said.

Mr. Costanzo said that sheer volume is to blame for the strange behaviour of the e-mail system.

When the system is overloaded, he said, the "handshaking" between incoming and outgoing servers slows, or even stops. A receiving server may be able to accept an incoming message but has no time to send an acknowledgment to the sending server; as a result, the sending server keeps trying to send the message again and again, which results in a user receiving several copies of it.

Sometimes the receiving server is overloaded for a long time, and the e-mail is returned to the sender, often with an error message that is itself erroneous. Globetechnology.com staff experienced that when told a certain e-mail address did not exist this week, when the address was in fact working.

Part of the problem for Sympatico users is that those who have taken the initiative to call Sympatico technical support for an explanation have received a scripted response that admitted little, or was vague and unsatisfying.

One reader said that a technical support representative had told her that "we are aware of the delay and are working on the problem." But when she pressed for further information, the harassed support worker said he'd been told to say that it would be "fixed in a few hours," and that he knew it wouldn't. Days later, she said, the problem still hadn't been resolved and the technical-support message remained the same.

Sure, it's easy to blame this on the spammer's, but not using spam blockers, anti-virus software, firewalls and all the other tools available to stop this is the equivalent of leaving your keys in your car..........

[Dale O Sea]

...Sure, it's easy to blame this on the spammer's, but not using spam blockers, anti-virus software, firewalls and all the other tools available to stop this is the equivalent of leaving your keys in your car..........

Exactly! Thanks again, megman.