Thursday, 27 December, 2001
RoadRunner Blocks Port 80
I learned today that RoadRunner (my broadband provider) is now blocking port 80 on the network. They've been doing it for quite a while, but I didn't notice because I haven't had my server running. I of course couldn't call and ask them why, 'cause my contract says I won't run a server on their network. And typically I don't, but I need to test something.
They started blocking port 80 because so many people who did have servers got infected with the Code Red virus, and all those infected servers started searching for other servers to infect. From the continuous flashing of my cable modem's activity light, I'd say that network utilization was maxed. That's stopped since they started blocking. That won't prevent people from running servers, as it's easy enough to put an HTTP server on port 81 or 2563 or whatever, but it'll limit the vulnerability to things like Code Red.