My personal favorite of those studies is “The Role of Internet Service Providers in Botnet Mitigation: An Empirical Analysis Based on Spam Data”, 2010/05, OECD Publishing, available here.

It would actually be quite interesting to see the data drilled down even further, so instead of comparing countries, we would be comparing individual ISPs.

A lot of the public debate has been circling around whether handling abuse is the ISP's responsibility and whether the whack-the-mole game is the right approach or whether it is actually counter-productive in the fight against Internet crime. While these are interesting debates, we've always felt that this is really about the quality of the services that we provide.


When a customer has his box hacked, the faster we're able to mitigate the situation, the better service we provide. When we're talking about consumers, cutting the connection or pushing the connection to the walled garden is really not about removing our customers ability to use the Internet but rather removing the criminals access to our customers system. We feel that we're essentially providing a service to our customers and if we make the world a better place while providing that service, it's a nice additional benefit. I know some ISPs share this view while others don't. That's life.

There's also the fact that a lot of the malware-infected customers have a worse “Internet experience” and they are likely to blame their ISPs for it. Take something like DNSChanger for example. For us, all customers infected with it have their DNS servers on the opposite side of the planet. That causes some latency issues. Also, when I read something like the “FBI’s Internet Blackout Postponed from 8 March to 9 July”, it makes me chuckle a bit. I checked our share on 7 March and we had two (2) customers reported to us that day, so “Internet Blackout” doesn't really apply to our customers.

What were the most significant challenges in setting up a system that will closely interact with users and warn them about infections? What were the major obstacles your encountered during this process?

Every new thing we manage to get running is aimed at making our work load a bit easier.