China Blocks Spam Servers

clafarge writes "I just read in the AP's LiveWire that, as reported by Xinhua News Agency, China has blocked 127 mail servers which it identifies as major sources of spam. Oh, happy day. They also published a list of 225 spam servers around the world just last month." Guess they're following through on this.

Comments

Bah

[krray]

That's IT? Jeez, me, myself, and I (plus my wife :) @ home have gotten about a dozen emails today (legit).

Didn't _see_ any spam, but the logs surely show 685 rejects from known previously spammed us IP's.

169 IP's made it known through various methods (ie: we don't KNOW anybody outside the US...) that they would probably spam us.

55 messages/IP's (slow day, typically a couple of hundred) were harvested from trap addresses.

To date I've had to unblock one (1) such IP at home (work is up to maybe a dozen now) that got caught in the traps. As email flows in, and not blocks, those IP's are reverse-harvested as OK. A problem child will become evident quickly. Damn, still trying to build the perfect mouse trap as a people, eh?

IP's that have made themselves KNOWN to be a problem for us? Up to 117,469,666 as of midnight tonight. Yeah -- that's 117 million IP's blocked. Only about 3% of the total ~3.9-4 billion IP's assignable.

127 mail servers. Bah -- child's play...

Oh -- and the number of spam's that I personally saw today? I think one, which the Mac highlighted for me and dumped it. I know the wife got worried her pecker must be too small a couple of times today...

Are these *REALLY* spam IPs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that these "spammers" are actually servers with legit users sending "illegal material" to China via e-mail? "Illegal Material" in this case would include anything that speaks out against the Chinese governent, or reveals news articles from unapproved sources.

Riiight.

[PsionicMan]

Uh huh. Blocking "spam" servers. Wonder how long it'll take before this becomes the convenient excuse for blocking servers espousing such dangerous ideas as freedom and political/ideological dissidence. Not that they don't do it already, mind you, but it would provide a nice, PR-friendly reason. After all, everyone wants to stop spam, right? Screw the constitution, get your shotgun, and let's go find the spammers?

Spam, child porn, and terrorists seem to be the current Horsemen of the Infocalypse. A couple of the old favorites, money launders and drug dealers, don't get so much press these days.

Close but still missing the mark...

[Rathian]

In its latest battle against junk e-mail, China has blocked 127 mail servers it identified as responsible for spam, the official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday.

*snip*

Ren said e-mail messages from 127 servers will automatically be refused. Xinhua said the sanctions would be lifted after the servers stop sending junk mail for three months.

Nevermind that ~70%+ of the spam sites I have been reporting are HOSTED in China. I had complained countless times to the Chinese whois contacts without positive result.

Spammers will ALWAYS find a way to send their unwanted garbage around until SMTP is upgraded/replaced with something more secure.

If China really cares, they need get Chinese companies to stop hosting these asswipes.

Re:Close but still missing the mark...

[anticypher]

This is the main reason China and Korea seem to be the origin of most spam, owned machines. Most of the spammers, probably more than 90%, are physically in the United States, but they crack machines in other countries to make it difficult for prosecutors to go after them.

Many companies in China do the absolute minimum to set up their computers, and to connect them to a local ISP. Firewalls, applying security patches, locking down systems, and other basic sysadmin functions are ignored because the companies directors don't know any better. Most of the press about hacking, spam, security and other problems are in English, very little of that makes it into the local papers and in the local language. So the problem will just continue until American prosecutors go after the criminals in the U.S. breaking into computers physically in other countries.

2bits, did you contact the abuse people at the upstream ISPs in the US and Mexico? Did you send them a detailed report of a criminal activity, breaking into your machines and stealing all your bandwidth? Did you do your part to help get these spammers off the internet, or did you just take money from your clients and not fix the problem.

Its not that difficult to get into the machines spammers are using, they tend to install pirated copies of PCAnywhere or BackOrifice, and not bother with passwords. So then you can check back and see where the spammers are, and mostly they are in the U.S. The biggest problem right now is getting US authorities to file charges against the spammers, because a real cyber-crime case is actually very difficult to prosecute, and the prosecutors tend to be very technophobic.

I gave up a long time ago trying to provide evidence to US Attorneys General to shut down spammers, and many spam fighters are turning to vigilantism now to chase the spammers from the net. Even /. has gotten into the act of exposing spammers

the AC

The list?

[gonaddespammed.com]

So where is this list. I'll block the same servers.

90 Taiwanese servers blocked..

[molo]

Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, eight were from the mainland and 29 were from elsewhere, Xinhua said, without providing other details.

Now we see the real agenda here. This is just another round of annoyances that China is imposing on Taiwan. Nothing to see here, no real spam blocking, just more propoganda.. or perhaps (tin foil hat on) they are blocking political messages/organizations from Taiwan and elsewhere?

I think that is actually more likely.

-molo

Good to know, but...

[gothicpoet]

It's nice to see them doing something, but I have to note that the times that I've tried to get something done about a server hosted in China that's attacking one of my client's IP addresses have gotten NIL results. Zilch.

That's in contrast to efforts to contact the named administrators of a given block of IP addresses in other countries. Not always responsive but it's been known to happen which creates a contrast.

Good to know they'll try to quash what they see as SPAM when it affects themselves. Be nice if they'd "act globally" and put a halt to practices regularly carried out by servers in their balliwick against users and servers elsewhere.

No, No, No!!!

[Mostly a lurker]

Trying to block spam by blocking email seeming to originate from specific servers just does not work. Email headers can too easily be forged. Further, even assuming you could identify where email originated, what do you do about, say, hotmail? Vast amounts of spam still start there. But, everyone I know also receives valid email from hotmail accounts.

Effective solutions to the problem of spam will need much more sophisticated approaches than just blocking based on the content of email headers. I have read some proposals, but none yet that seem both effective and easy to implement.

Try complaining to the right people.

[Dimensio]

I had complained countless times to the Chinese whois contacts without positive result.

I managed to get a Viagra shill site yanked. That happened after a mail filter misconfiguration caused over 4000 e-mails to be sent to to the host (china-netcom.com)

I've heard that people have had some results by CCing their complaints to every known Chinese ambassador contact address:

chinaemb_in@mfa.gov.cn, secretary@chinaembassy.nl,political@chinaembassy.n l, inf2@fmprc.gov.cn, chinaemb_in@mfa.gov.cn,china@opendf.com.br, webmaster@chinaembassy.bg,chinaemb@soficom.com.eg, info@chinaembassy.org.nz,consul@chinaembassy.org.n z, administration@chinaembassy.org.nz,culture@chinaem bassy.org.nz, science@chinaembassy.org.nz,defence@chinaembassy.o rg.nz, education@chinaembassy.org.nz,chinaeco@paradise.ne t.nz, webmaster@chinaembassy.nl,adm@chinaembassy.nl, culture@chinaembassy.nl,commercial@chinaembassy.nl , jiaoyu@xs4all.nl,military@chinaembassy.nl, scitech@chinaembassy.nl,culture@chinese-embassy.no , webmaster@chinaconsulate.org.nz,webmaster@chinaemb assy.org.tr, webmaster@chinaembassy.org.zw,webmaster@embajadach ina.org.pe, press@chinemb.fi,consulate@chinemb.fi, culture@chinemb.fi, edse@chinemb.fi,office@chinemb.fi, fin.shangwu@kolumbus.fi, chinaemb@simnet.is,chinacom@islandia.is, chinaemb@012.net.il, info@china-embassy.or.jp,consular@chinaembassy.org .np, culture@chinaembassy.org.np,embchina@adetel.net.mx , chnempng@daltron.com.pg,embaixador@embaixadachina. pt, conselheiro@embaixadachina.pt,politica@embaixadach ina.pt, cultura@embaixadachina.pt,militar@embaixadachina.p t, chancelaria@embaixadachina.pt,consular@embaixadach ina.pt, chinaemb_sa@mfa.gov.cn,political@chinaembassy.se, consular@chinaembassy.se,administration@chinaembas sy.se, military@chinaembassy.se,culture@chinaembassy.se, science@chinaembassy.se,moftec.swe@swipnet.se, info@cnedu.nu, protocol@chinaembassy.se,webmaster@chinaembassy.se , CHINA-EMBASSY@BLUEWIN.CH,chinaembassy_tr@fmprc.gov .cn, sinoem@zol.co.zw,chinamission_un@mfa.gov.cn, fmco_mo@mfa.gov.cn,minister@legalinfo.gov.cn

Oh No *sniff*

[cluge]

*begin tongue in cheek mode*
But where will I get my viagra? How can I loose those extra inches I dont' want and gain the stronger thicker inches I have been promised? How will I ever live longer without my supply of DHEA - or how will I ever find term life insurance or a good mortgage rate?
*end tongue in cheek mode*

*begin rant*
Any help is appreciated - but I'm afraid that unless you take the consequences to the spammer out of the cyber world and put it into the real world nothing will stem the flow of SPAM. For example; when a spammer is hurt in his/her-> it's pocket book, or they get jailed with a large inmate who calls them "my personal love chicken", then and only then will they stop. I favor baseball bats and the angry mob approach, your mileage may vary.

Pressure must continue to be exerted on ALL spammers and their customers. Lets face it China did this because enough mail providers had blackholed the entire continent of china and chinese business men were resorting to hotmail/some other method to communicate and it cost them MONEY. It took the consequences out of the cyber world, and put them into the real one.
*end rant*

Free speech or DoS?

[Angostura]

Your argument seems to rest on the belief that most spam contains 'opinion' that has the right to be expressed.

Now, does the belief that my penis is to small count as opinion? what if the mail consists of the characters 'tretretrdytreye' - opinion? what about if the mail consists of a self-replicating Word macro. Is that an opinion? and would it be a restraint of free speech to turn macros off?

Not intended as a flame, but there are interesting gradations here. It could be argued that spam, like the person who shouts 'fire!' in the movie theatre, is actually a DoS attack

Outlook 2k3

[instanto]

The Outlook 2003 filter seems to do a good job at recognizing spam from not spam. Still a few emails get through that are spam, and ocasionally some legit emails get put in the spam folder (I noticed that the OSDN Newsletter gets put in the spam folder - .. is'nt that funny ;) ).

I heard that earlier whole netblocks from china/asia were blocked by ISP's in the West as there were lots of spam relays there that the admins would not shut down.. maybe this will change now.

China may not have a good human rights record (nor does many other countries though) but maybe in the war against spam a communist country is the cure.

They wont know what they're missing

[goodbye_kitty]

You've gotta applaud the Chinese government for censoring spam mails given that the populace cant even read the bulk of them (yet). Thankfully the chinese language spam market is still fairly limited and hopefully this will nip a potentially very big problem in the bud. Having lived and worked in china i can say with confidence that their internet filtering systems are weak at best and easily circumvented, even by accident. Most of the time they just filter according to URL, e.g. www.cnn.com would be out but europe.cnn.com would work. No content based blocking occurs at all, for example if you find that you cant read CNN in china (which is usually the case) you just go somewhere that you would expect to pretty much mirror the content (e.g. The Sydney Morning Herald) and read away to your hearts content. As well it is interesting that chinese language taiwanese news sites are censored but english language taiwanese news sites are not. Having said all this i must add that most (read 99.99%) of the internet population in china couldn't be the least bit interested in reading american-biased news or cheap CD offers, and trust the US government almost as much as most USians trust the Chinese government.

What "Blocking" really means

[billstewart]

If you read the articles, it doesn't say that they're stopping Chinese spammers from sending spam to foreign countries. It says that they're blocking mail to Chinese ISPs _from_ 127 alleged spam sites, mostly in Taiwan. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if most or all of them really _are_ spammers, because China has a market for Viagra and Cable Descramblers too, and there'll be spammers happy to fill it. But China's been heavily into censorship for a while, not that it's easily enforced even if you have quasi-monopoly Internet backbone providers.

Unfortunately, I'd guess that almost all of those sites are sending spam in Chinese. I get very little of that - almost all the spam I get from China is in English, though there does seem to be less of it than there used to be.

Spam from Florida.

[vitojph]

Come on, guys, everybody knows that the spam capital of the world is the beautiful Boca Raton, Florida: in spanish and in english.

China ha nothing to do with this.

Now...

[WindBourne]

if we can just block AOL, Yahoo, and MSN from doing spam at a corporate level.

Great news

[tcr]

This feels good...

I've been using Spamcop on my personal accounts for a while now, and blocking all email from China, Brazil, Argentina, etc. Analysing the held queue now and again, it was amazing how much of this crap was coming out of China.

Guess it shows that if enough organisations are prepared to ignore their torrents of junk, things start to happen.