Network Abuse

Introduction

In this document when we refer to "network abuse," we mean network-based attacks directed at you, our customer. There are a variety of reasons why someone may wish to attack your service, not all of which are provoked by you. The hosting of IRC services and popular discussion forums greatly increases the risk of you being a target for attack.

Dealing with network abuse

When a large amount of traffic is directed at one of our customers, there are two possible outcomes:

1. Our monitoring detects it and we are able to block the unwanted traffic in co-operation with you and with our suppliers.

   You will be liable to pay for the traffic that made it to our network, and if the attack features random sources and ports then we may have no option but to block all traffic to your service.

2. The amount of traffic overwhelms our network and disrupts service for you and some or all other customers.

   In this case we will have no option but to block access to your service, terminate your account, and send you your content on DVD together with a pro-rata refund of unused service.

Obviously, we don't want to have to shut down any customer's service but in the event of a large attack we will have no choice; BitFolk is a small ISP and our prices reflect this, we simply cannot afford to absorb the cost of downtime and the effect on other customers when one customer becomes the focus of sustained attack.

Even some of the largest providers in the world are susceptible to network attack. If you wish your service to be able to withstand this, you need to engineer this from the start, spending a lot of money in the process. It is not possible for BitFolk to do this for you and still remain competitively priced for the majority of customers.