The Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA) has
published new recommendations for ISPs regarding spam.
ISPA believes that in order to combat spam effectively action is
required from the internet industry, the government, law
enforcement agencies and end-users.
The self-regulatory measures set out in the recommendations
should be backed-up by effective laws enabling action to be taken
against persistent spammers, said ISPA.
Jessica Hendrie-Liaño, chair of the ISPA council, said, “ISPs
hate spam. It saps valuable bandwidth, can compromise the integrity
of a network and affects the performance of mail servers. Combating
spam costs ISPs and their customers very significant amounts of
time and money.”
ISPA advises consumers to protect their PCs with firewalls. This
prevents them from being turned into zombie PCs by spammers,
creating an open relay which allows the computer to be hijacked and
used to mail
spam and send out viruses.
A recent study showed spammers use zombie PCs to distribute over
80% of spam across the internet.
Hendrie-Liaño said ISPs should reduce spam by ensuring that
their email systems will not relay e-mail for unauthorised third
parties, and that all e-mail generated within their network can be
traced back to its source.
Effective abuse procedures should also be in place to make
reporting of spam easier, and users should be informed of other
services provided by their ISPs to help keep spam to a minimum, she
said.
Many users however would be surprised to find out if such
measures weren’t already in place at their ISP.
More details on the recommendations can be viewed at:
http://www.ispa.org.uk/home/page_364.html
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