ISP System Glitch - I Hope
Yesterday my ISP blocked my internet access for a couple of hours when their automated spam blocker somehow misidentified my connection as having been sending spam. The ISP did not of course accuse me of sending spam, their block page suggested that it would have actually been caused by a virus or spyware having got installed on my system and that this was the most likely source of the spam. Their block page also offered free antivirus and antispyware software for download so that you could use the time you were blocked in scanning your system to find and remove the problem.
I didn’t need their download links because I already have a full range of security software installed on all my computers and the antivirus software had already brought itself completely up to date before the block started.
Generally I rely on the antivirus software running constantly in the background to identify viruses etc as they first enter my system and so running a full scan of the system is rather redundant but just to confirm that there was no way that there were any viruses on any of the computers I immediately ran a full scan on each of them. In each case as expected the scans came up blank - no viruses, worms, trojans or anything else that the antivirus software could detect.
Next step was to run antispyware software to search for anything that it could detect that the antivirus didn’t. Now I don’t go downloading files very often and am extremely careful of what I do download and so I don’t keep yhis software completely up to date all the time but rather than download completely different software from the one link available to me while the spam block was in place I ran the version that I had available under each separate login on each of the computers (that’s at least twice per computer since the everyday logins don’t have administrator access). As expected all that any of those scans found were a few tracking cookies - something that couldn’t possibly be the source of spam. Just to be certain I upgraded the software to the latest version once my internet access was restored and ran all the scans again. This time they came up blank.
Next step was to check the firewall settings on each computer. In each case outgoing email protection was enabled with a limit of five emails every two seconds and no more than 50 recipients per email. Were emails to be sent from the computer at a faster rate or to more recipients then an alert would pop up asking for confirmation before allowing the emails to be sent. Access to send emails was also limited to the one email program that is actually used on the two computers that are actually used to send emails and there were no programs allowed to send emails on the other computer. This would make it almost impossible for any virus or spyware to send spam from my computers even if there were one there to make the attempt.
In order to make it even harder for spam to originate on my system I decreased the limits on the outgoing email protection. The computer without email access is now set to a maximum of one email to one recipient with a specific email address every 999 seconds and the others are now limited to one email every 60 seconds with no more than 5 recipients.
Given that my scans had shown that it was impossible for any spam to have originated on any of my computers I contacted the ISP and reported this fact and asked them to check on what information that they had that showed that the spam had originated from my system. Their response was to request an administration fee of $100 in order for them to supply that information. This is why I am now hoping that it was actually a glitch in their system that caused them to misidentify the origin of the spam since the alternative is that they deliberately applied the spam block in order to try to get me to pay out the $100 and I don’t believe that any ISP would be silly enough to try something like that.
Given the security measures that I already have in place there is only one way that I can make it any less likely for spam to reach my ISP’s mail servers from my system and that is to reconfigure my computers so that no emails at all enter their mail servers from my computers. As I am certain that my computers are not sending any spam but have no way currently to prove that to the ISP I have therefore taken this additional step and so there is now no reference whatsoever to the ISP’s mail servers on any of my computers and so it is now completely impossible for any emails whether spam or otherwise to reach their servers from my system.
p.s. I finally convinced someone at my ISP to forward me the report without the $100 charge. It seems that someone reported a reply that I made to a question that they asked to AOL as spam. Anyone who actually viewed the email could see that it was quite obvious that it was not spam. I will be pursuing this further with my ISP. As I have no control over AOL and their stupid spam policies my only option with regard to their treatment of this situation is to treat them the same way they treated me and block them for sending bogus spam reports. My apologies to anyone using AOL who wishes to communicate with me but this action is a direct response to theirs and I can’t afford to have my internet access blocked by their bogus reports to my ISP.
Tags: antispyware, antispyware software, antivirus, antivirus software, AOL, firewall, internet access, isp, ISP System, security, security software, spam, USD, yhis software