Getting tough with Trojans

In a unique move, Australian ISP, Telstra BigPond, is temporarily disconnecting compromised computers from its network to stem a tide of malware swamping its servers and delaying e-mail and Web site requests.

According to the ISP, the number of bogus requests to its DNS had on occasion reached a level where some customers reported slow responses to legitimate requests for Web sites or e-mail. Ongoing investigations identified Trojan-infected customer PCs as the likely source of the false DNS requests.

BigPond had boosted the capacity of its DNS servers to reduce the inconvenience to customers until a long-term engineering solution was developed. The company was encouraging customers not to 'hard-code' DNS addresses in their network settings so that users can be directed to an alternative BigPond DNS server in case of further problems cropping up.