Comment by amaccuish
7 hours ago
Could it not be argued that ISPs should be forced to block users with vulnerable devices?
They have all the data on what CPE a user has, can send a letter and email with a deadline, and cut them off after it expires and the router has not been updated/is still exposed to the wide internet.
My dad’s small town ISP called him to say his household connection recently started saturating the link 24/7 and to look into whether a device had been compromised.
(Turns out some raspi reseller shipped a product with empty uname/password)
While a cute story, how do you scale that? And what about all the users that would be incapable of troubleshooting it, like if their laptop, roku, or smart lightbulb were compromised? They just lose internet?
And what about a botnet that doesn’t saturate your connection, how does your ISP even know? They get full access to your traffic for heuristics? What if it’s just one curl request per N seconds?
Not many good answers available if any.
> While a cute story, how do you scale that? And what about all the users that would be incapable of troubleshooting it, like if their laptop, roku, or smart lightbulb were compromised? They just lose internet?
Uh, yes. Exactly and plainly that. We also go and suspend people's driver licenses or at the very least seriously fine them if they misbehave on the road, including driving around with unsafe cars.
Access to the Internet should be a privilege, not a right. Maybe the resulting anger from widespread crackdowns would be enough of a push for legislators to demand better security from device vendors.
> And what about a botnet that doesn’t saturate your connection, how does your ISP even know?
In ye olde days providers had (to have to) abuse@ mailboxes. Credible evidence of malicious behavior reported to these did lead to customers getting told to clean up shop or else.
Xfinity did exactly this to me a few years ago. I wasn't compromised but tried running a blockchain node on my machine. The connection to the whole house was blocked off until I stopped it.
It could be argued that ISPs should not snoop on my traffic, barring a court order.