BSNL – Outbound Spam Guard and the Botnet Scourge

With the steady expansion of broadband services throughout Asia, service providers are increasingly facing the challenge of addressing spam originating from their networks. A large percentage of subscribers’ PCs are controlled by botnets that operate by infecting computers with malware and then using those computers to send spam.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is an Indian telecom provider with over 90 million customers that was one of the largest spammers in the region – regularly appearing in the top 3 on the UCEPROTECT blacklist – which identifies networks with high spam/botnet infections.

Once an IP address is blacklisted by an RBL service such as UCEPROTECT, emails from an ISP’s customers are often blocked and never received by the intended recipient.

In 2017, BSNL turned to CYBONET for outbound spam protection in order to:

  • Reduce spam leaving its network
  • Remove IP addresses from blacklists (RBLs) like UCEPROTECT
  • Reduce bandwidth consumption
  • Identify customers whose PCs were infected
  • Reduce customer complaints of emails not being delivered
  • Strengthen brand and IP reputation

BSNL chose CYBONET’s Outbound Spam Guard (OSG) to fulfil these key requirements. The OSG is easily deployed, and as a carrier-grade solution can handle email traffic of billions of messages a day. It is non-intrusive – stopping spam without impacting legitimate customer service.

Within 2-3 months of deployment, the OSG had enabled BSNL to meet its aims. There was a huge reduction in spam leaving its network, freeing up significant bandwidth, and BSNL’s IPs were removed from the top 20 spammers and off the blacklists. Due to its IP addresses no longer being blacklisted, customer complaints relating to undelivered emails also reduced. OSG’s in-depth statistics further allowed the service provider’s network engineers to pinpoint which subscribers had become infected by botnets and to proactively clean up its network.

To learn more about CYBONET's OSG and how service providers can harness its power to neutralize botnets, improve IP reputation and reduce unwanted bandwidth consumption, click here or contact info@cybonet.com‍