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Isp: how would ISPs know if a customers system is compromised ? how can they prevent

hi , I am currently doing mini project on ISPs and customer systems for my uni project. Any help or advice is much appreciated

The question is : how would ISPs know if a customers system is compromised ? how can they prevent that from happening?
 
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If you search our news you'll find a few issues like this related to Virgin Media and separately Microsoft strategy, which cover similar areas. In general though an ISP can sometimes, but certainly not always, very generally pick out spam or other malicious activity by looking for unusual activity on their network and ports that relate to a known abuse (botnet, virus, Trojan etc.).

Prevention is a more complicated matter. ISPs will normally warn and assist infected customers first and in some cases providers, such as Virgin Media, have been known to temporarily suspend connections for accounts that fail to address a problem that could be causing serious problems for other internet users. But you can't easily prevent such things from happening without sacrificing the open nature of internet access.

The ultimate responsibility is with the computer owner to ensure that they have adequate security.
 
Plusnet used to, many years ago, detect and then disconnect "on-the-fly" customers who had unusual traffic coming from their line. At one point I couldn't even nmap without being kicked onto their "You might have a virus" limited portal.

I expect that keeping their detection methods up to date would be expensive and unreliable these days due to the huge number of different threats. I don't know if they still used the above system.

Tom - www.mouselike.org
 
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alright, well thank you for your help , i have found this forums useful as i have been reading up the threads on ISPs and security side. I guess i will have to research into port blocking used by ISPs and other techniques used to montior traffic . However do you think its worthwhile to contact ISPs to see if they will share any information ? i personally think id look like a fool asking :/
 
"Seek and ye shall find"

Dont bother with Talk Talk though, most of their staff dont know how a light switch works, let alone the interwebs.
 
I did contact BT about it and they sent me a simple e-mail regarding what to do if your email has been compromised however their technical staff denied to share any information due to security reasons and simply responded we have a security team in place and we expect our customer to have a anti-virus software installed. When asked do you monitor traffic and packets etc and the employee simply laughed and said sorry sir i can not share any information.
 
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haha yes i wouldn't bother with them or virgin as they might just try to sell me a product in the process :shrug:
 
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