Do DSL/Cable accounts get disabled due to viruses?

I work at a University partially maintaining a student residential network. This semester, more than any other, a large part of my job has been to help students get viruses removed from their machines because the network ops have disabled their ports. These viruses are destructive to the network (nachi/blaster/various spamming/SMTP viruses) in the sense that they cause extreme load.

OK. There is a small controversy brewing here. Some people here say things like: “Well, if they were on a DSL or Cable connection, they would be shut off and not get the courtesy of having somebody clean up their system.” Is this statement true?

I have never heard of anybody having a home connection terminated due to a virus problem. Am I just ill-informed?

Not sure I understand what you’re trying to say.

Certainly if the student had a DSL/cable connection which they bought on their own and their PC was disabled by a virus they’d be stuck. Unlike the university who employs you to babysit them, their commercial ISP would say “tough luck, fix your PC yourself”.

If you’re asserting that the ISP would disable thier account as punishment for being infected, well no. If a user became infected and his/her PC was now a spambot or other nuisance then yes, they might well terminate the account. But it’d have to be a pretty egregious spambot.

But once the student got the PC cleaned up and promised to keep a valid firewall / antivirus program running, and groveled a bunch to customer service, well then they ought to turn it back on. They understand that ignorant users are often unwitting victims.

I hope that’s an answer to the question you intended to ask. If not, try clarifying and see if anyone else chimes in

Yes, it happens. An old client of mine called me and Comcast shut her down until her computer was cleaned up.

I guess they gave her several warnings about it.

I didn’t clean her computer so I don’t know what virus she had. I suspect one of those mail-bombing, outlook ones.

I manage Verizon fast packet data switches in the Potomac, Mid Atlantic, NY & NE regions. We do sometimes disable the switch ports if the end user equipment has become unstable and is generating a large number of alarms in our network. The Verizon DSL group is my customer, I expect they would do the same if any residential user started spamming one of their DSLAM links.

But this is done via human intervention. Viruses can’t get into telco switches to disable communication links.

The problem with shutting down the user’s connection is that the user may need to download the latest virus definition to stop the particular virus he or she has.

But, if they go days without fixing it after several warnings, you have to cut them off some time, I suppose.

My DSL connection was cut off because my ISP thought I had a virus (I did not). Which wasn’t so bad but when I called to ask why my connection was down they didn’t tell me (It took a second call to find out why). They put a CD with free anti-virus tools in my front door (which I found out about 2 weeks later since I use my garage entrance mostly). I went in to work to verify I had the latest virus definitions.

So I can tell you that ISPs do turn off connections for suspected viruses.

Brian

LSLGuy, it takes much more than just me to babysit these kids. Close to 1/5 of all internet users on campus have been disabled this semester.

Thanks for the replies, it pretty much answers my question. I simply had never heard of anybody having their ISP disable them.

The reason that it’s an issue is because we’re talking about different ways of dealing with viruses next semester. One proposal is instituting a “reactivation fee,” the theory being that once word gets around that it will cost 20 or 30 bucks if you’re turned off due to a virus, it will spur students to update Windows and virus protection. Some people (me) think this would do nothing but increase the complaint factor from students. One argument in favor of this is that in the real world they be SOL and so have no room to complain. They have no room to complain anyway as it’s invariably their own fault that they are infected. It’s surely not mine.

It’s not nice to blame the victim!

Primary fault lies in the turds that unleash virus/worm/etc. Secondary fault lies in the computer industry for making life far too easy for the above-mentioned turds.

Note that in blaming the computer industry, I don’t just mean Microsoft. For instance, ISPs would be doing their customers (and themselves) a giant favor if they would issue their customers DSL routers instead of “modems”. Universities would be much more useful if they would teach kids in computer science a thing or two about security. Standard internet protocols would be more difficult to attack if some thought was given to security when these protocols were created.

The current system of releasing a patch or ten every week and expecting users to upgrade everything isn’t a solution - it can’t be, because it is attacking symptoms, not the root causes. Patches aren’t even a good band-aid, because there’s no guarantee that the patch will hit the user’s computer before the exploit, and also because in critical environments (admittedly, not a student dorm) you can’t just apply patches bllindly without thoroughly testing them to make sure they don’t break anything.