Telewest, which according to its website provides telephony and/or broadband services to 1.8 million customers in the U.K., ran afoul of the Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) when it was found that many of Telewest’s customers’ computers had been hijacked by viruses and worms. Some of the machines were reported to have been delivering over 100,000 suspect emails a day.
SPEWS operates by checking spammers’ IP or machine addresses against a database of previous offenders. Telewest reported that it knew about the possibility its subscribers’ machines might be being used as spam proxies, or slaves, and it was working with customers to fix the problem.
Telewest issued a statement that punishing the near-million broadband users for the actions of what is believed to total about 17,000 voluntary or involuntary spammers on its blueyonder.co.uk domain is unfair. Blueyonder generates about 90.4 million emails a day.
A Telewest representative said that the company plans to release a free firewall, anti-spam and anti-virus package later this year, but added that the spam-by-proxy issue is one which the entire ISP industry suffers from, not just Telewest.
Telewest also is the nation’s second-largest cable provider, though subscriptions plateaud and fell in 2004 while its Internet business grew.
