Time for ISP responsibility
Posted : Friday July 25th, 2008

So several weeks after the DNS flaw was first announced, and several days after details were leaked on the internet several major ISPs have yet to patch their systems.

I almost wish there was something I could say to defend the slowness, but there isn't. The reality is that many ISPs, and it often seems especially large ones don't care. They don't care about the quality of their product, they don't care what effect it has on their customers, and they really don't care what effect their negligence has on the internet at large.

Sadly this not caring is nothing new. Alot of the problems on the internet today, specifically spammers and various botnet drones, can be attributed to the negligence of ISPs in general.

How?

Well "back in the day", when dial-up was king, when you connected to your ISP you tended to connect to just your ISP's local network which was in turn connected to the internet. All of which meant that between Joe Blow's computer and the internet there was at least one router/firewall.

But then high speed came along and everything changed. Now people's computers were connected directly to the internet with no router/firewall to protect them. And did the ISP's take steps to educate their customers on the risks inherent in these new technologies and what basic steps might be taken to make themselves safe?

No.

And the results are available for all to see. For many years many of the biggest spamming operations were run through high speed networks of North American ISPs. And it's estimated that nearly 1/4 of computers on the internet today are infected with some form of botnet trojan tool.

So all in all the fact that several major ISPs have still not patched their DNS servers should not come as a shock. But that doesn't make it any less irresponsible or negligent.

Tags

botnet  DNS  ISP  responsibility  spam 

Categories

Technical  Security  Internet 

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