ISP Spammer Booted from the Internet
'I've got to basically start all over,' company president said.
By: Justin Bourne
Posted: 09/23/2008
According to
TechWorld, infamous service provider Intercage's access to the Internet has been cut.
San Francisco-based Intercage, aka Atrivo, was booted offline late Saturday evening when Pacific Internet Exchange, the company's last upstream provider, terminated service. Other upstream providers eliminated Intercage's service in recent weeks, but it was Pacific stepping in that ultimately kicked the company offline.
Emil Kacperski, president of Intercage, told TechWorld that Pacific neglected to inform him of the reasons surrounding its termination of service, but presumes it was due to pressure from Spamhaus, a nonprofit anti-spam faction that has put Intercage in its cross-hairs. Spamhaus reported more than 350 occasions of cybercrime hosting on the Intercage network during a three-year period.
"Spamhaus placed Pacific on its Spamhaus Block List on Sept. 12, after it began peering with Intercage," Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox told reporters. "Obviously they were feeling the displeasure of the rest of the Internet."
A team of cybercrime experts published a white paper on Intercage last month, demonizing the service provider as a "major hub of cyber crime," security researchers explained, adding that they found 78 percent of the domains and mail servers on Intercage's network were criminal.
"Kacperski ignored complaints about illegal activity on the Intercage network for more than five years and only recently began to respond to problems," Matt Jonkman, an independent researcher who contributed to the white paper, told reporters. "His network was used for very clearly hostile criminal activity. I'm not aware of any legitimate customers."
Kacperski noted that his company endeavored to eliminate bad operators from its network and be more receptive to grievances, but that Pacific ultimately dropped them anyway.
Kacperski said Monday he was seeking a new service provider, but that he had no idea how long it will take him to get back online. "I've got to basically start all over," he said.
Pacific was unavailable for comment by post time.
