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."

Comments

Why am I not surprised

[lavalyn]

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.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[anticypher]

The 419 scams were cracked down on in the Netherlands recently, sending the scammers mostly to Madrid and Barcelona. Its a whole community, the majority are no longer Nigerians, but a mix of eastern europeans and west africans. The africans work the front end of the scams, pulling in leads. The eastern europeans work the back end, setting up banking accounts, credit card processing scams, laundering the money and the like.

There are a bunch of network operators tracking the technical guys, who buy up space in Colo's to house their scam sites and ADSL connections for the apartments where the scammers operate from. Mostly they use hijacked machines spread all around the internet for their relay points and temporary (30-90 minutes) websites, but those tend to be controlled from a few central servers. These are scary people to deal with, the Albanians have a nasty reputation of just killing anyone who might cross them. We were warned repeatedly by the police to not confront them, but take notes and let the police deal with it. There are dozens of unsolved murders blamed on the Albanians, including some from the 419 scam gangs.

In the Benelux area, we're glad the police finally did their job, even though the investigation took more than a year. Now its the poor Spanish police's turn, and the scammers know they don't have an effective high-tech group. So expect the 419 scams to continue to grow.

Still, Clueleyless is right about most spam coming from US sources, despite their using hijacked machines all around the world. I haven't seen a spam recently that didn't have a US oriented payment method, US phone number, US mailing address. Its American spammers targeting American victims, and American law enforcement is afraid to do anything about it. I can't remember the last time, if ever, I saw a French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch language spam. Or one in Euros.

the AC

Much from compromised computers

[AlecC]

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.

Re:Much from compromised computers

[rm007]

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

Not so surprising, the figure is not really out of whack. While the population is a little more than one tenth - 32 million vs 292 million - higher internet usage levels, especially broadband penetration probably accounts for some of why the Canadian figure is not closer to the 5.7 - 5.9% that you might expect. As other posters have noted, normalizing the data would have helped make more sense of the of the numbers that they present. At any rate, it is safe to assume that too many Canadians and Americans do not secure their computers properly if compromised machines account for so much of the spam.

Re:Much from compromised computers

[RetroGeek]

the abuse departments are too lazy^H^H^H^Hoverwhelmed to do anything about them

I sent them a log of IPs pinging my firewall, trying to connect using NetBUI, trying to pop-up net msgs, etc. I stated somewhere in the msg that my firewall was constantly writing ot the log from all the hits. A LOT of the IPs were from within the Shaw set of IP addresses.

The response?

"this is a common problem, turn off the logging in your firewall".

Turn off my logging? How does that stop the hits?

Poor research...

[Genjurosan]

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

Re:Poor research...

[puhuri]

Of course, because there is large number of computers (and poor anti-spam laws), the US will have large number of poorly maintained computers.

I just made some research about spams I have received this month, and according to it, the top ISP list looks like following:

• AT&T WorldNet Services
• SBC Internet Services - Southwest
• Comcast Cable Communications, Inc.
• CHINANET-BACKBONE
• Cable & Wireless USA
• Korea Internet Exchange
• AOL Transit Data Network

(Based on AS numbers, names from whois db). One thing I noticed was that there were no significant difference in time of day when spam messages arrived, flow is steady throughout day and week.

Quite interesting, however, is the fact that I get most of virus emails from Europe (Italy and France).

Re:How about normalizing that data?

[g0qi]

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.

canada's population

[Reinout]

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

Re:No.1 sender and hardest to block

[Troed]

.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

Re:How about normalizing that data?

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

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.

Re:So much for the AXIS OF EVIL...

[MCZapf]

We probably also have more "entrepreneurs" (spammers and their customers) who are trying to get rich quick. That is, after all, the American Dream.

More statistics I'd like to see

[petard]

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.

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 .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.

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.

Re:An idea for curbing spam?

[Professr3]

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.

Statistics, my dear Watson.

[ClayJar]

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.)

Spam per capita - the numbers favor Canada

[jrifkin]

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

Re:While they're at it...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Who Is Surprised By This?

[Pave Low]

Your reply only demonstrated how the US isn't an Empire, where it's so fashionable to claim it is here.

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.