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The Measured Effectiveness of Blocking Asian Spam

Posted by chrisd on from the spam-is-bad-mkay dept.

fadden writes: "I recently started blocking IP addresses in China and Korea that were sending me spam. Instead of a blanket ban, I only blocked the subnets from which spam was being sent. After my first week of scanning and banning, I wrote up a report on the effectiveness of the blocks." In related news, SSKennel adds that: "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has discovered (prepare to be amazed!) that revealing your email address in chat rooms can get you spammed. It claims to have taken action against spammers who harvest email addresses and use them to send fraudulent spam." Shocker!

5 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Epiphany by RatBastard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Quite a few people don't know this simple fact. And it's not because they're stupid, either.

    One person's "common sense" is another person's "mystery of the unknown."

    --
    Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
  2. Re:Epiphany by Moonshadow · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The thing is, most average uses don't know this. To their knowledge, the only way a spammer could get your address is for you to put it into a webform somewhere.

    Most casual users probably don't even consider the possibility of their address being harvested from other places, such as chat rooms.

  3. Re:Blocking subnets? Use SPEWS. by EvilAlien · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And probably lots of legit mail too, unless you have a tiny mail server. SPEWS is an awful choice for large commercial services, they subscribe to the "throw the baby our with the bathwater" theory. They are ever more clumsy and heavyhanded than ORBS was.

    --
    perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
  4. Re:How I block Korean spam by Moonshadow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with this approach is that a lot of people on Windows platforms using Outlook/OE send HTML mail by default, even for a simple text message.

    A much more reliable appriach is the "pattern matching/scoring" technique a few pieces of software out there use. I've been using Spam Asassin for a while now, though (too lazy for a link :) ) and I have yet to see it a) tag a legit email as spam, or b) miss a spam message. If that sort of thing were installed on mail servers by default, then it may be possible to cut down spam drastically. Right now, my config just puts [SPAM] in the subject line - makes it easy enough to filter. Why can't ISPs do the same thing? I know that Spam Assassin is a bit resource hungry, and isn't practical for large scale operations, but surely something similar could be written that would accomplish the same thing with minimal resource drain.

  5. Or, to put it another way...... by Ride-My-Rocket · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One person's "Duh!" is another person's "Huh?"/