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

Thanks

[cOdEgUru]

For giving me all the domain names that I need to block out.

Wish there was some way I could block out that stupid Hotmail email begging for money to increase account size.

Spam problem

[PhysicsGenius]

There is no way to "fix the spam problem". Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications. Spam is noise on a data channel. Measurements suggest that the amount of spam we are seeing is slightly higher than the nlog(n) amount that Shannon predicted. This is probably due to people responding to their spam emails because, whether in jest or not, this relabels them as data instead of noise. The same goes for people who forward their spam to services like SpamCop--you are only clogging the network even more, please stop.

Re:Spam problem

[Zathrus]

There is no way to "fix the spam problem".

There certainly isn't if you're fatalistic and don't look for solutions.

Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications

Ignoring the abundant misunderstanding of Shannon's research (hey, go read here and you'll already know more thant he poster), to call spam noise on the data network is an amazing stretch. Spam is not noise. Spam is data. If you took the spam off the network some other crap that nobody wanted wouldn't magically fill the spot.

I also deeply question your off-the-cuff nlogn value for spam. Let's just take my Hotmail account as an example. It receives roughly 200 spam emails a day. They average 8k each. So that's 1.6MB of spam per day per user. Now, there's 118 million Hotmail accounts. Assume that a mere 1% of them get this much spam. That's 1,888,000 MB of spam. Daily. To Hotmail alone. That's nearly 2 terabytes of capacity. Daily .

Now lets start throwing in Yahoo! mail, AltaVista mail, juno, excite, etc. etc. etc. and start counting numbers. It's scary. Very, very scary.

If anyone can actually provide real numbers for how much bandwidth is consumed by spam, please do. I did a Google search a couple weeks ago and came up empty. Lots of sites referring to it consuming "great amounts of bandwidth", but no hard numbers.

Where's the Asian spammers?

[tshoppa]

It's a fascinating site, a really cool map.

But where are all the Asian spammers? I'd guesstimate that I get 30 or 40 foreign-language spams apparently from Taiwan, Malaysia, and India every day. It's more than half of all the spam I get now.

Connectivty and hackers

[Joel Ironstone]

If I was into distrupting the peace and all I would take a good hard look at this map and determine which connections are the most fundamental.

Generally in these types of partially connected maps, a few nodes exist without which the whole systems shuts down.

Sort of makes one feel like the rebels when they got a map of the deathstar

I want this poster on my wall!

[neitzsche]

Where can I buy a copy of this? Thinkgeek does not seem to have it yet...

how to avoid getting on The Map

[happyclam]

OK, /., here's a question for you:

I'm not a real network geek (just a regular joe programmer), but recently my email address has been co-opted by a spammer. That is, I've received spam from my own email address. (I of course did NOT send it.)

The question is, how can a regular joe like me prevent this from happening in the future so my domain does not appear on some future version of The Map? I know about the guy who hacked into the spammer's laptop and got all their personal information, but I don't have the skills or access for that.

This is interesting:

[talks_to_birds]

See: Blacklist

Under "Upstreams", for Freeze.com (listed as a backturner, listpooler, stonewaller):

Rackspace.com > swbell.net

"Rackspace auto-replies to abuse reports, then forwards the complaints to the mailer without taking action. Freeze is a long-time network marketing mailer. Tried to educate them, but they failed to get a clue, even after many emails exchanged, even with top management. So, they go straight to the Bit Bucket. Partner in spam: optinglobal.com (see their listing on this site).."

Rackspace.. Rackspace..

Where have I heard that name before?

OH! I know!

They advertise right here on /.

Gee. I thought they were really cool-geek kinda people.

Now it turns out they're whoring for spammers.

Kinda makes ya wonder, don't it...

t_t_b

Re:This is interesting:

[Erik Fish]

From what I've read Rackspace has been cleaning up their act recently. I don't know that they've fully graduated from black to greyhat, but something is better than nothing...

PNG beats GIF (again)

[Rock]

As a certified PNG geek, I was obligated to convert their original image, "spamdemicmap.gif". Downloading it, I found the size to be 885,452 bytes. The image is 4442x2900 by 48 colors. As a PNG image, the file was losslessy converted to 585,548 bytes. What do you want to bet they would have loved to have this 33.8% bandwidth savings while being slashdotted?

Joe-job

[KjetilK]

Don't worry, anti-spammers are used to this happening, it happens all the time, and people are getting good at knowing when it has happened. In fact, if somebody does it really bad against you, you should be honored, because it means that you really annoyed a spammer. It's a called a joe-job. It's happened to me too. Somebody sent a pr0n-spam in my name.