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Earlier this month, Brett Wentworth took Level 3 Communications Inc. into territory that most rivals have been reluctant to enter. The director of global security at the largest carrier of Internet traffic cut off data from reaching a group of servers in China that his company believed was involved in an active hacking attack.
The Broomfield, Colo., company handles roughly 40% of internet traffic and is taking an aggressive—and some say risky approach—to battling criminal activity. Risky because hackers often hijack legitimate machines to do their dirty work, raising the risk of collateral damage by sidelining a business using the same group of servers. Such tactics also run against a widely held belief that large carriers should be facilitating traffic, not halting it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @03:44PM
The SSH Psychos have been pounding on my servers non-stop for months now from several very large blocks of extremely well known IP addresses. I have long since blocked them, but this should have been stopped at the source long ago.
I blame the owner of those addresses for not taking ANY action whatsoever. If this disrupts their business, then too f*cking bad. At this point they have demonstrated either a level of incompetence or collusion that fully justifies the internet death penalty.
There is no excuse whatsoever for enabling blatant criminal activity on a global scale. The actions taken by Level 3 is entirely appropriate.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @08:38PM
While I agree with you in principal, this is a huge stick they are wielding.
The issue becomes fragmentation of the internet when nobody can remember why we blocked some block of addresses in the first place. The first rule put in place will be easy...but once we get 50+ rules stuff will start breaking that isn't intended.
Perhaps it will shake up a couple of ISPs to better police their users.