Users pay the price as BT Connect hit by spammers

BT customers have been left stranded this week after the telco's Connect small business service was blacklisted for allowing spam email to be sent through its servers - an activity known as open relay abuse.

Internet watchdogs discovered the problem and blacklisted Connect server IP addresses, leaving customers without access to basic Internet services.

One customer, UK-based messaging company Plain Sailing International, which has customers in over 100 countries, has been unable to send emails through BT Connect since Thursday.

Its managing director, Malcolm Hart, told Silicon.com: "The information we've got from BT is very limited. Had it been more informative, we could have made much more dynamic changes to our system. We've now made those changes but as a result we've had serious complaints from a lot of our customers who don't see BT as the problem - they see us as the problem.

"It has caused considerable damage to our business and we will be seeking compensation from BT. We were in the process of upgrading our system with BT - that is now under review and we're looking at alternative suppliers," he added.

Roy Hills, technical director Internet security firm NTA Monitor, said the problem was caused by the default configuration on most email servers. "They're set up to allow routing from anywhere to anywhere," he said. "It's not difficult to change and its something most ISPs have known about for years."

According to Hills, around a quarter of Europe's mail servers are still configured to allow open relay abuse. "The problem is out-of-the-box servers are configured for usability, not security," he said. "They're just not secure enough for a hostile environment."

BT admitted it is having a problem with unwanted third parties abusing its server facilities, but refused to comment on how many companies have been affected. "The problem is a variation of distributed denial of service which is creating restricted resources available for customers," it said in a statement.

BT is currently reviewing its security and said it will restore normal service as soon as possible.