The Spam Prevention Early Warning System (anti-spam group) has taken the extraordinary decision to blacklist almost 1m Internet addresses belonging to Telewest's customers. The action was taken because many of the users PC's have allegedly been hijacked by spammers:

In a statement Telewest said: "We are aware of the increase in e-mail volumes due to customers' PCs which have been infected by worms and viruses."

Telewest blamed recent virus outbreaks for the sudden rise in the number of hijacked home PCs. "We are currently contacting affected customers to help them clean their PCs which, as you can imagine, is a time-consuming task," it said.

Telewest also said it was working on a more permanent solution to problem by installing security systems within its network.

It's not the first time we've seen a situation like this, although rarely has it been done to such a scale. We're unsure as to whether every single one of the addresses is infected, or if it's simply a blanket server ban, which seems more plausible.

Either way we feel sorry for the customers involved, especially those that are clean of such Virus/Trojans. More @ BBC News Online.