Copyright 2003 Dolan Media Newswires

Long Island Business News (Long Island, NY)

November 21, 2003 Friday

Spammers are hijacking Optimum Online, Cablevision's broadband Internet service, to blast a blizzard of messages around the country, prompting at least a few businesses to block all e-mail traffic from the service, according to system administrators.

One Internet service provider in Salt Lake City with about 25,000 subscribers, Xmission.com, blocked e-mail from Optimum Online for about 2 months in response to the wave of spam. After letting traffic resume about two weeks ago, Xmission spam administrator Jim Hudgins said he was on the verge of restoring Optimum Online to his blacklist.

"The block may go in," Hudgins said. "Today alone, we've had 21,906 [spam messages] from that domain. We've been hammered."

Optimum Online is hardly Xmission's only source of spam.

Hudgins said on a typical day, the ISP fields 2 million incoming e-mails and blocks 60 percent of them as spam. Still, he said that the volume from Optimum Online poses a problem.

"I'd be surprised if there weren't a lot of other ISPs that are blocking that [Optimum Online's] domain," he said. "It's a big problem from that source."

Also blocking e-mail traffic from Optimum Online is Dolan Media Co., the Minneapolis-based corporate parent of Long Island Business News, which controls the e-mail flow to its stable of business, legal and commercial newspapers.

Despite entreaties from LIBN editors, system administrators there decided to include optonline.net among the hundreds of domain names they block, also citing the volume of spam.

"A lot of people have been blocking them [Optimum Online] for a long time," said Emory Lundberg, security engineer at Waltham, Mass.-based Guardent Inc., a computer security firm. "Some people have decided there's no legitimate e-mail coming from it and they block it all. They're willing to lose legitimate e-mail to see less spam. To some people, optonline.net doesn't exist."

Inserting "optonline" and "spam" into an Internet search engine also reveals numerous instances where e-mail administrators cited Optimum Online as a source of spam. An Optimum Online spokesman declined to address technical issues, but said the service is working to curb the flow of spam through its system.

"Combating spam is always a high priority item and like all other major ISPs, particularly cable companies that provide fast and robust Internet connections, we are always working to mitigate both in-bound and out-bound spam."

Though Optimum Online is hardly the only ISP to be used as a vehicle for spam, the blockages raise the possibility that legitimate users' business or personal e-mail messages could fail to reach their intended recipients.

Spam issues aside, six-year-old Optimum Online has been a bright point in Cablevision's broad portfolio of businesses, which include the core cable business, the New York Knicks, Madison Square Garden, the Lightpath business telecommunications unit, regional sports channels and a satellite TV service expected to be spun off next year. Optimum Online also is a key pillar in Cablevision's strategy of offering its four million subscribers a triple play: cable, Internet and its recently introduced voice over Internet protocol telephone service, Optimum Voice.

In October, the cable modem service announced that it had passed the million subscriber mark — up from 680,025 in September 2002 — with a penetration rate of more than 23 percent, the highest in the industry.

Still, the image of the online service could be tarnished, particularly if subscribers' legitimate e-mails are blocked along with spammers' messages.

In the past month, when Lawrence Weber has sent an e-mail through his Optimum Online account, he hasn't been sure whether it would end up in an inbox or disappear into the ether.

"In the past month, there have been significant sporadic problems with e-mail transmission in that e-mail was delayed or never delivered and you never got a bounce-back telling you there were problems," he said.

Cablevision techs told Weber, president of TechMark Corp. in Holbrook, that the problems were related to hardware.

On the receiving end, Weber said he does get several spam messages a day in his Optonline account, but fewer than he got when he tried free e-mail accounts offered on the Web.

To thwart spammers, Cablevision officials have instituted a rule limiting to 50 the number of addressees to which a single message may go. If users want to send a message to more than 50 addresses, they must be broken into blocks of 50 or less, according to Optimum's online support.

Some broadband subscribers also could be unwitting spammers. Lundberg said that in one common ploy, hackers break into computers and then sell the connections to spammers.

"Spammers will put their mail software into this cable modem user's house and use it to sell Viagra," he said.

Another source of spam is subscribers who set up a home PC with a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol engine which allows the user to send outbound mail without going through Optimum Online's e-mail client, said Steven Trupp, a principal at Bohemia-based Futures Technology.

Indeed, the ingenuity of the spam meisters has put some system administrators at their wit's end. Even Hudgins, who went so far as to blacklist Optimum Online for a time, voiced pessimism.

"Unfortunately, I don't think we're winning," he said. "It's like building a sand castle with the tide coming in."