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U.S. is World Leader in Spam
adept256 writes "Sophos outs 'dirty dozen' spam producing countries. And the USA is in the lead by a country mile. 'The United States is far and away the worst offender, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the world's spam. Even though European countries are responsible for less spam, they are still generating millions of junk emails a day,' said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos."
I wonder if this proves a connection between industrial pollution and virtual pollution?
Spamming computers may appear to be foreign, but in the end, it's nearly always an American source. Or from the Netherlands for some reason in those stupid 419s.
If you're not blacklisting from Spamhaus's SBL+XBL of spam outfits & open relays, and dialup pools, those ones are natural things to start blocking on connect.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
I'm all for the initiatives been taken by Yahoo etc to try and put a stop to spam by making sure the email protocols are up to scratch.
...but the REAL answer is to arrst the ******** who are sending this stuff and throw them in jail !
This needs doing anyway...
I don't understand why this is SO difficult !!!!
Reading the article, a more interesting point is that at least 30% - which probably accounts for a large slice of the US end European contribution - is from compromised machines. They believe most of those are directed from Russia.
Aside from the absence of Russia, the only thing I find surprising about the list is the high position of Canada - second, 6.8%. Given Canad's relatively small population, that must make them the leader in spam-per-capita - an unpleasant distinction.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
It's those MS machines on broadband that are hacked into spamming zombies.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
The article indicates that the 'researchers' spent two days collecting information.
Only two days of research is a lame attempt at a research project.
For all we know, those responsible could alternate source every other week, thus invalidating this 'insightful' conclusion.
Also, the article fails to mention how they are so positive of the origin. Who knows how many open relays the spammers use.
I'd believe an article that indicates that the US has more open relays than any other country, as I would venture a guess that it's relative to total number of computers wired to the net.
my 2c
Does this include American "Businesses" that use overseas computers for spamming?
Excelent point but I think that that data could also be expanded even more. Think about having stats on some of the following items.
Number of computers on internet
NUmber of computers with high speed internet
Number of computers with upto date antivirus and patches
you get the picture
with a little more indepth research i think you have an excelent analysis of the spam epidemic and maybe be even able to more effectively battle it if we had the right statistics.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
For too long, US Sys & Law Administrators have taken cover saying that the source of spam is almost always foreign and there's nothing they can do about it. This article is the wake up call. It doesn't matter what email traffic the US generates, but it just proves that much of the spam is from within.
Yea. I know.
Canada's population is 31.6 million (2003).
I looked at it as I wondered whether the Netherlands (16 million) would win in the spam/capita contest. Nah, canada wins. 3x the spam, 2x the population.
Reinout
Reinout van Rees
.us ... you might want to think twice about why US companies aren't using it - and about whether companies all over the world are evil when they (also) want to use .com
it's in my head
That's an interesting take, and if true it's the only take-home lesson - that over half of US spam is generated from within.
However, to look at this from yet another angle, who's "responsible" for spam - the sender or the asshat who left his server open? And which are they tracking? (I'm presuming servers).
I'd like to see a split of legal and illegal spam, ie cases where a server was or wasn't hijacked. I'd also like to see spam as a total fraction of a nation's mail - sent and/or received.
...in a lot of crappy things.
Unfortunately, I can't afford to leave this damned country. If I could... I would. But, I have a duty to others of my kind who also feel trapped here. That duty is to try an get people who are on the fence to see the light and join our side in changing the direction that things have gone in. Trust me people, I'm willing to fight to get my country back if need be.
Un-news
We probably also have more "entrepreneurs" (spammers and their customers) who are trying to get rich quick. That is, after all, the American Dream.
This is a good statistic, as far as it goes. What I'd really like to see summarized is the breakdown of non-spam email on a global basis as well as a S:N ratio for each country.
.tld, counting non country code TLDs as US-ian: About 60 are legitimate, business-related emails, and 40 are spam. Of the spam, 20 seem to come from the US or Canada, 8 from Europe, 2 from South America, and 10 from Asia. I also have about 40 valid messages from the US or Canada, 15 valid messages from Europe, and 5 from South America. So my S:N on messages from North America and Europe remains high, it's lower from South America, and 0 from Asia.
For example, on a typical mail day lately, I seem to be getting around 100 messages in one of my mailboxes, not counting Windows worms and related crap. Here's my breakdown, based only on
I'd be curious to see these numbers for a more global sampling of email. It seems unlikely that anyone would be in a position to provide them, though.
.sig: file not found
This is a very interesting idea... Still, how do you propose to deal with the privacy issues? Having a limited number of trusted servers makes it a lot easier for communications to be monitored.
I'd probably base the "power" and "greatness" of a nation on more than just the land the occupied, but thats just me.
The spam issue is such a large scale issue that the rules governing statistics should hold quite nicely (when you've got a sample size in the millions...).
The probability of a statistically significant number of spammers just happening to have said, "Let's use all our *US* zombies!" this particular day and then deciding the day after the study, "You know what, let's all go back to our Salmnonian zombies!" is so preposterous as to be humorous. It would be like having a majority of US voters wake up and decide for two days to vote for the Green Party candidate, then all of them switch back right after the primary. (If it were a small sample size, this could happen, but for a large sample size, it is *far* less likely.)
If you normalize by population Sophos's reported national spam percentages things look pretty different. The scores are no longer so lopsided, and the winner is ... Canada?
COUNTRY.....PERC...........POP....PERC./POP.Canada.......6.80......32207113...2.1113e-07
US..........56.74.....290342554...1.9542e-07
Netherlands..2.13......16150511...1.3188e-07
South_Korea..5.77......48289037...1.1949e-07
Australia....1.21......19731984...6.1322e-08
Spain........1.05......40217413...2.6108e-08
France.......1.50......60180529...2.4925e-08
Germany......1.83......82398326...2.2209e-08
UK...........1.31......60094648...2.1799e-08
Mexico.......1.19.....104907991...1.1343e-08
Brazil.......2.00.....182032604...1.0987e-08
China........6.24....1286975468...4.8486e-09
Given that the article ends with a link to Sophos' PureMessage product, you could be forgiven for smelling spam all over this thread!
Graham Cluely is an excellent shaman of the press and always seems to get Sophos' name into the hardcopy press - in the UK at least. He did the same for Dr Solomon before McAfee swallowed them up...
You didn't refute any of part of my statement you quoted. We ARE the richest, most powerful, and most prosperous. There's really no debate there.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
The vast majority comes from client*.comcast.net and rr.com and attbi,com (all broadband providers with little interest in informing users that their machines are now zombies).
6 [0-9].*.*[ 0-9].*.*] .*.*
Comcast are the worst offenders.
Here are some IPs to block:
24.1[0-9].*.*
24.2[01].*.*
24.[0-9].*.*
67.1
67.17[0-4].*.*
68.3[2-9].*.*
68.[45]
68.6[0-3].*.*
68.8[0-7].*.*
69.13[6-9
69.140.*.*
It is a shame, I admit, but I didn't just block Brazilian e-mail, I blocked access from large chunks of Brazilian IP space from any access.
Every few weeks I'd open it back up and see what happened. Sure enough, very large numbers of port scans and attempts to see if my servers had been Zombified. E-mails with firewall logs sent to the abuse addresses for those IPs did nothing, so back into the block list they went.
I have to admit, I was fascinated by the question: Why is this particular ISP in Brazil such a haven for these types of attacks? I never found an answer to that, though. But it was bizarre to me that our network was scanned more times by Brazil than everywhere else combined.
I will give you a counter-example. I do not block IP blocks from Argentina because I always received prompt replies from the Argentinian ISPs. And I don't receive spam from Argentina any more. The ISPs in Argentina, as a rule, do not permit spam to originate on their networks. The whole country benefits because of this policy. (Well, if you call being able to sent me email a benefit. ;-)
Blocking IPs is not something I did on a whim. But it was and is highly effective in blocking a great deal of all spam delivery attempts. I recently upgraded my email server and my relay rules were not applied -- I didn't really appreciate how well those rules were working until that point. It took me less than a day to realize that something was seriously wrong.
Sorry, but those rules stay until I am convinced they are no longer needed.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
No, you have more clueless "businessmen" and criminal scam artists, paying criminal spammers to use hijacked machines from all over the world to send out spam with american english spelling, for products sold to americans, priced in US dollars. And while they're at it, they spew their shit out to the rest of the world, even advertising products useless outside the US (US cable descramblers, mortgages, discount phone plans). Here in the UK my spam mailbox is filling with more than 80% of the spam being for some useless american crap, about 5% for useless european crap, 419ers, idiot MMFers (usually american) and bestiality porn ads etc. making up the remainder.
Yeah, let's block outgoing SMTP at the same time as people are starting to introduce SPF (Sender Permitted From) to stop people from using their forwarding address when sending via their ISP's SMTP server.
That's the best idea I've heard since Michael Jackson and R Kelly discussed opening a daycare center.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
That's why worms and spammer trojans often include their own SMTP server implementations.
We keep hearing a lot about spam and most people know exactly how the things are propagated. There was a story of that Connecticut spammer who got something like 45000 mails (snailmail)per day after his home address was published on the net. Why doesn't the fed wake up and close the loopholes? 70% of emails are junk and that's a big loss to the nation's economy..