Mapping the Spam

demaria writes "The folks at cluelessmailers.org have made a map of spam. It shows the relationships among spammers and other entities (legitimate or not), including organizations that track spam, advertises with, shares addresses, emails through, and all sorts of other data. I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."

Comments

Re:Good job /.!

[cetan]

Well, I'm happy to give up some bandwidth for these guys, it's a cool map. Here's a mirror.

http://www.cetan.com/mirrors/spammap.html

No need to mod me up, I'm not a karma whore.

Mirrior

[Huogo]

http://www.5light.com/spamdemicmap.gif

mirror, mirror, on the wall

[tedtimmons]

This site was pretty slow to respond- probably because the gif on that page is about 1MB.

So I've mirrored it.

-ted

Re:Good job /.!

[DustMagnet]

So why didn't you provide a link like this overview or like this smaller version or even a google cache.

It seems to me, that you comment is really extra lame.

Re:Spam problem

[Zeinfeld]

Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications.

He did no such thing. Shannon's law demonstrates that the information bearing capacity of a communication line is limited by the signal to noise ratio.

It is quite amusing to see how such basic observations are transmorgaphied by the game of Internet chinese whispers.

Spam will be addressed as a problem as soon as the pain barrier becomes high enough. With PKI it is possible to identify an email sender by means of a digital signature. The current problem being that there is no good way to locate public keys bound to email addresses. There is a lot of good work going on in this area, in particular the W3C XKMS group recently discussed a working draft that describes a mechanism for accessing public keys via DNS SRC records.

So under this system what would happen is that when you get email from them the email client would scan your address book to see if they were on your approved sender's list. This would probably include the individuals you know (Cmdr. Taco etc.) and also whole domains (ai.mit.edu) you might trust. if the mail is not in the list it goes into the 'low priority' pile.

There are email clients that do this at the moment but the spammers are using counter measures, such as scanning email list archives and sending out SPAM with fake sender addresses taken from the archive. With PKI and a means of determining whether the person actually has a public key or not this type of filtering becomes much more robust. Incidentally the mechanism does not require S/MIME to work, it can also be used with PGP.

To deploy the solution all we need to do is to persuade email client writers to support XKMS register and locate functions and ISPs to provide XKMS services along with their existing SMTP server. Oh yes and finish the XKMS spec I guess.

Re:Where's the Asian spammers?

[Hollinger]

I get a bunch of these too.
What's sad about this is that I've figured out the korean characters for "advertisement," by trial and error, and automatically filtered all that junk out of my mail.

Re:how to avoid getting on The Map

[BoVLB]

[M]y email address has been co-opted by a spammer. That is, I've received spam from my own email address.

Many spammers now seem to put the recipient as the From address. Presumably this helps the mail to avoid certain filters. So in all probability, you're the only one being spammed from your address.

Re:how to avoid getting on The Map

[lightcycler]

If a spammer's just using your email in the "From" field of an email, there's not much you can do to technically stop them. There are great laws against it (forgery, fraud, misrepresentation, etc.) if you can find out who they are (try to get an IP address, then ask the police for help finding whose it is) but more often than not, you'll get nowhere.

See the linux.org's site for a description of their similar problem (people using *@linux.org as a From address, and people complaining to linux)

If people really do think emails are from you, get into a habit of PGP-signing emails. Let people know that if it's not signed, it's not from you.

Perhaps you might also find a way to autoreply to the people who vent off at you about how evil spammers are. If you get an email with "Re: (your standard spam regexp filter here)", delete it and reply with an explanation. Kmail is good at this, and The Bat on windows (30-day trial) is even better.

So, sign emails. Pity there's not more that you can do.

Re:Where's the Asian spammers?

[ceejayoz]

Or, if you can't read oriental languages, you could do it the easy way and just block any e-mail with oriental characters in them...

privacy policies

[Aanallein]

Looking at some of the blocks on that map with most arrows poiting to them, I visited those websites and looked at their privacy policies.
I wonder why they even bother having them, but it's a nice way to inform us of everything being done.

For example: eScriptions.net:

eScriptions.net reserves the right to post collected data on eScriptions.net's Web site, or share, rent, sell, or otherwise disclose data it collects to third parties. Any third party to which eScriptions.net shares, rents, sells, or otherwise discloses personal data will be carefully prescreened by eScriptions.net, determined by eScriptions.net to be reputable, and will use the personal data for marketing products and services which eScriptions.net determines, in its sole judgment, that visitors might find of interest.

virtumundo.com:

The Company may receive information about individuals from third parties or from other sources of information outside of the Company including information located in public databases

THE COMPANY MAY USE INDIVIDUAL INFORMATION FOR ANY LEGALLY PERMISSIBLE PURPOSE IN COMPANY'S SOLE DISCRETION. <snip> the Company may change or broaden its use at any time.

THE COMPANY MAY SELL OR TRANSFER INDIVIDUAL INFORMATION TO THIRD PARTIES FOR ANY PURPOSE IN COMPANY'S SOLE DISCRETION.

I particularly like the way they go through excruciating trouble to explain "webbugs" though:

(b) Webbugs. A webbug is programming code that can be used to display an image on a web page (by using an programming function -- see www.www.org for more information), but can also be used to transfer an individual's unique user identification (often in the form of a cookie) to a database and associate the individual with previously acquired information about an individual in a database. This allows Company to track certain web sites an individual visits online. Webbugs are used to determine products or services an individual may be interested in, and to track online behavioral habits for marketing purposes. For example, Company might place, with the consent of a third party website, a webbug on the third party's website where fishing products are sold. When Joe, an individual listed in Company's database, visits the fishing website, Company receives notice by means of the webbug that Joe visited the fishing site, and Company would then update Joe's profile with the information that Joe is interested in fishing. Company may thereafter present offers of fishing related products and services to Joe. In addition to using webbugs on web pages, Company also uses webbugs in email messages sent to individuals listed in Company's database.

*pats his Mozilla that displays html mails as plain text and will not load remote images in mail and news (two seperate functions)*