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TeleWest Blacklisted for Spamming |
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Thursday, 12 May 2005 |
According to reports, the email addresses of about one million customers of UK telco TeleWest ( telewest.co.uk) were blacklisted by anti-spam organization the Spam Prevention Early Warning System ( spews.org).
The organization says it took the action because a large number of TeleWest’s Internet customers were hijacked and used as spam servers.
Analysts say that with the increased sophistication of spam filters, spammers are using methods typically employed by virus writers, hijacking machines with malicious code and using them as proxies. Hundreds and even thousands of machines or "bots" are then used to generate thousands of email messages. Spam filters are incapable of checking whether these machines are all legitimate or not. As a resullt, SPEWS has taken the rather drastic action of blocking all of TeleWest’s email traffic.
"We are aware of the increase in email volumes due to customers' PCs which have been infected by worms and viruses," TeleWest said in a statement. "We are currently contacting affected customers to help them clean their PCs which, as you can imagine, is a time-consuming task."
The SPEWS system, used by a range of Internet service providers and spam filters, checks the sender field of each email and blocks it if it comes from an email address known to be sending spam.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 14 April 2008 )
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