[afnog]Re: Slow internet access

[Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net>]

    > My connection to the net suddenly became very slow
    > such that it takes close to 3mins to open just a yahoo
    > page. I complined to my ISP( Newskies UK) and was told
    > by their agent here in Nigeria that it has to do with
    > a virus msblast on the system.

There have been a lot of new Windows viruses in the past month.  Many of
them use a huge amount of bandwidth.  So it's quite possible that your
satellite connection has become congested with traffic from Windows
viruses trying to propagate themselves.

One way you can begin to deal with the problem is to have Newskies filter
the commonly-used ports on their side (inbound toward you), and you filter
them outbound toward Newskies.  You would then log the source IP addresses
of all of the machines which triggered the outbound filter, and block
their international Internet access until their owners cleaned them up.

This is labor-intensive, but it's the way that most people have dealt with
it.  Many people are also putting a surcharge (in the U.S. it's seeming to
be about US$30 per incident) on Windows users, in order to encourage them
to move to more secure operating systems, and cover some of the costs of
cleaning up after them.

                                -Bill


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