Tiscali email outage blamed on spammers

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Spammers were the target of blame as some of Tiscali's customers were unable to send emails for more than a week.

As revealed by IT PRO's sister publication PC Pro yesterday, dozens of angry customers have been complaining of emails not reaching their intended destination since the beginning of last week.

Only late yesterday did the company admit the problem was caused by spammers sending thousands of junk mails from the ISP's accounts, leading other email providers to place Tiscali on its spam blacklists.

Several customers on the Tiscali support forum complained that the company was attempting to cover-up the problem, but the ISP says it acted as swiftly as possible. "We knew we had some complaints in the forums early last week," said a company spokesman. "Because we weren't seeing any volume in support calls, we were treating them on a call-by-call basis. Calls were on a routine level until [last] Friday."

The bad news for Tiscali customers is the company estimates it could take another seven to ten days for other ISPs to take Tiscali off its blacklists, leading to more delayed or undeliverable email.

Security experts claim ISPs are particularly vulnerable if they let security slip. "It's a warning to an ISP that if you're not properly secured or configured then spammers may try and take advantages of your infrastructure, and you'll end up on a blacklist as a result," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "It's particularly bad for ISPs, of course, because they have thousands of users trying to send messages."

Cluley said the rudimentary spam filters employed by some companies may have exasperated Tiscali's problems. "There are services out there which block simply based upon the [email] sender. Sometimes they are run by volunteer groups and it can take a while for them to end up on the whitelist again."

Tiscali claims that the spam problem is industry wide and that it's not the only victim of such attacks. Cluley, however, said the speed at which the ISP reacts to the problem is crucial. "We've certainly have seen ISPs who've had these problems in the past, but normally they hear about it so quickly, and they act quickly to resolve the issue," he said.

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