A research group has accused Verizon of helping crooks and cyber criminals of aiding in their activities by routing over four million IP addresses through their network.
Verizon has been featuring in news headlines for all the wrong reasons lately. In the latest event, a secret report published by The Spamhaus Project has accused Verizon of aiding hackers and cyber criminals by routing more than 4 million IP addresses via its network.
The Spamhaus Project is a renowned, globally operating non-profit organization, which has started maintaining a spam blacklist for some years now. The organization has also collaborated with law enforcement to capture spammers and various spam operations plaguing the Internet.
According to Barry Barnagh, representative of Spamhaus, the current depletion of IPv4 address block has pushed hackers to steal IP ranges from IT firms’ IP pools. The IP pools targeted by cyber criminals are those that companies either doesn’t use or haven’t setup routers for those IPs.
Some of the IP address ranges routed via Verizon and used for spamming are listed in this screenshot / Image Source: Spamhaus
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Due to the relaxed ASN setup procedure of Verizon, hackers can easily submit forged documents to the firm and let them route their stolen IP lots via their servers. Mr. Banagh reveals that with this approach, over 4 million IP addresses have already been routed via Verizon’s network. These addresses are later used to spam users through the “snowshoe approach.”
Mr. Banagh added:
“It seems very strange that a large US-based ISP can be so easily convinced by abusers to route huge IP address blocks assigned to entities in the Asia-Pacific area.” “Such blocks are not something that can go unnoticed in the noise of everyday activity. They are very anomalous, and should call for an immediate accurate verification of the customer.”
As per The Spamhaus official, Verizon apparently doesn’t care much because, since July last year, the organization has been trying to contact Verizon’s numerous departments but to no avail. Also, the Korean and Chinese firms from where a majority of these IP addresses were stolen appear to be defunct or are under the control of spammers or their plotters. Spamhaus various complaints fell upon deaf ear in this case but Verizon is helping cyber criminals, which is illegal and perhaps, it is time for the firm to face the wrath of law enforcement.
