A2B a Dutch ISP Complains to Police Following its Blacklisting by Spamhaus

A2B Internet an ISP in Holland has complained to the Police following its assertion that Spamhaus an anti-spam agency based in London blackmailed it. Theregister.co.uk published this on October 13, 2011.

Here it maybe mentioned that Spamhaus, which Steve Linford founded during 1998, is a global outfit that essentially tracks spam-related operations and e-mail spammers.

Lately, Spamhaus posted a request for stopping the entire data-traffic that Cyberbunker (or CB3ROB) a German ISP allowed. Cyberbunker is widely known for hosting and aiding The Pirate Bay a popular torrent website. Incidentally, Cyberbunker operates many server racks via assistance from an A2B associate. An upstream facilitator, A2B rejected the idea of stopping Cyberbunker's entire IP range, while decided for stopping just a single IP address, which according to Spamhaus, was a spam source.

Furthermore, Erik Bais Managing Director of A2B told that following the above development, Spamhaus decided for enlisting each and every A2B client's total IP range within its blacklist. Consequently, many companies got de-linked from the Internet and became unable to dispatch or get e-mail, published theregister.co.uk dated October 13, 2011.

Thereafter, when 24-hrs passed, A2B surrendered and stopped traffic from Cyberbunker. Subsequently, A2B's name was eliminated from the blacklist.

This however, is extortion, says A2B, as also that the blacklisting of the ISP wasn't because of it allowing spam. The action Spamhaus took was unlawful and unjust, A2B claimed.

Meanwhile, an IT News online site from Holland contacted Linford, who refused making any remark about the particular instance. Nevertheless, he did articulate about Spamhaus having certain rule regarding blacklisting ISPs, which aided spammers. If this was described as extortion, then it was similar to being barred from entering a restaurant incase of not maintaining a dress-code the outlet maintained, and subsequently asserting that the person was being extorted, Linford continued. Virusbtn.com reported this on October 13, 2011.

Conclusively, Spamhaus has been confronted with several legal suits earlier, essentially from entities it directly charged with conducting spam-operations. In one particularly famous case, e360 a mass-mailer sued Spamhaus making the latter compensate for the damages via paying $11m initially that, however, was lessened to only $3, later.

Related article: A New "Blackmailing" Variant Creeps Around…

» SPAMfighter News - 10/24/2011