[92475] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: tech support being flooded due to IE 0day
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Vixie)
Fri Sep 22 00:55:00 2006
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com>
Date: 22 Sep 2006 04:54:05 +0000
In-Reply-To: <4513664E.2030509@uoregon.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
joelja@uoregon.edu (Joel Jaeggli) writes:
> Even in an enterprise it's really hard to justify the expenditure that a
> rapid response to a host security problem involves. For an isp which is
> not likely to be in the position to recover the cost of being reactive
> let alone pro-active I can't imagine how they would possibly support
> desktop issues like this.
and yet, when i consider my nontechnical friends with their DSL and cablemodem
connections, i know that if they get hit by an exploding DLL, their ISP is one
of the likely places they will place a call. and then they'll carefully nav
their way through what they call "voice mail hell" until they can talk to a
"live operator", no matter how complex that is, no matter how many steps, and
no matter how much musak-on-hold they'll have to listen to.
the perfect storm is a million extra customers calling over the course of a
week just to explain that they have "exploding DLL symptoms" and listen to a
"live operator" tell them that this isn't a network problem and they should
contact the dealer where they bought their computer, which is likely CostCo.
assuming that this takes less than 60 seconds per affected customer, it's
still a nasty unbudgeted expense and as a secondary burn it will make real
network problems harder to report.
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Paul Vixie
