Spammers Create Problems for Tiscali E-Mailers

Some customers of Tiscali ISP could not send e-mails primarily because of spammers' activities. This happened for a week or so. The problem occurred when hackers invaded Tiscali's security and started distributing junk e-mails. As a result, quite a number of other ISPs blocked their users' messages.

When a large number of subscribers began receiving 'mail not delivered' messages, they started to report the matter on May 21, 2007. But it was much later on May 29 that the company acknowledged the problem and admitted that spammers were pushing out bulks of spam mails from its accounts. Consequently, other e-mail providers added Tiscali to their spam blacklists. Till now Tiscali has not declared what number of its 1.8m U.K. subscribers suffered the brunt of the outage.

Many customers complained on the Tiscali support forum that the ISP was putting the blame elsewhere while the company asserts that it stepped up solutions very fast. A company spokesman said in a statement that it was aware of the complaints presented in the forums during the previous week. But since there were not enough support calls the company was handling the calls separately. They were arriving on a regular basis till Friday May 25, 2007.

According to Tiscali the entire industry was suffering from the spam problem and that the attack had not targeted Tiscali alone. The crucial aspect is how quickly the ISP reacts, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. There have been many ISPs which experienced such problems earlier, but all had received complaints soon enough to respond fast and resolve them, Cluley added in his statement. ITPRO published the statement on May 30, 2007.

In addition Tiscali confirmed that its engineers would deploy new hardware and update existing spam filters before the day May 30, 2007 ends. But Tiscali thinks mail servers and other ISPs would take 7 to 10 days to find the improved changes after which they would be able to resume accepting e-mails from Tiscali customers. Till then Tiscali users could rely on "an alternative free e-mail service" for guaranteed delivery. ZDNet reported this on May 30, 2007.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 6/12/2007