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71% of Spam Servers are Located in China
aspelling writes "
We all know that majority of consumer electronics and other goods sold
in US stores is produced in China. But China specialty extends beyond
consumer electronics, clothes and automotive components. According to Commtouch Software research 71%
of all spam servers are located in this People Republic. "Since Jan. 1,
we've seen probably a 30% to 40% increase" in spam traffic" Commtouch
CEO says. BusinessWeek reports
about this issue."
Isn't 71% of everything made in China? I've always thought all spam, both meat and annoyance flavors, were made in China...
I am from China and this is a SPAM !
We got hit by the 61. and 219. IP blocks hard from Taiwan
This guy is way out there
Go to the press release (it is listed on the page) and click on the link for the white paper
But surprise, surprise, the "best solution" is the one they sell, but it's still an interesting read.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
If you don't know anyone in China (or Asia) you can use a blacklist for the whole region. My firewall with OpenBSD's awesome spamd autoupdates its tarpit blacklists every couple of hours. One good list for Asian IPs is here.
I love the idea of tarpitting, seeing spammers connections being tied up for ~3300 seconds (my highest) warms my heart. If more people did it that'd mean less overall spam traffic.
Trolling is a art,
What does the govt. have to say about it?
Or do they just concern themselves with what's information is comming into their country..
If China can keep much of the rest of the internet inaccessable to their citizens, why can't the rest of the world block the polution that China is transmitting?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
is that why all my messages are from jennie?
Yet another IT service being outsourced overseas........
Write your congressperson and demand that SPAM jobs be kept at home!
I have no reason to ever get traffic from china when I'm talkin about my own personal servers.
First question is what netblocks can I block to effectivley ban all of china?
Hardly surprising, since as soon as you spam a million people, an hour later you're hungry to spam a million more. ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
What about the big firewall stuff that China uses to restrict access? I guess it doesen't affect email?, or maybe it's government approved?
they'res a lot of spam.
So, what's holding us off from just blackholing the entire country until they get their political act together?
another example of outsourcing
Great, maybe xenophobia will result in meaningful anti-spam legislation over here if nothing else.
That'll make Bush and geeks happy.
Block all mail coming in from anyone in Chinese.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Me Chinese, me play joke, me send ads for erectile disfunction drugs, marital aids, sites with farm animals, septic tank cleaning, unlimited monthly income potential, hot stock tips, offers to meet girls in your area, and tiny little remote control cars to your inbox.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Hey, It's China. Give them a break. Almost all of our stuff comes from China, why not the spam? We still owe them for Chinese food.
It happened to Spain, it should happen to China too. I find this very weird since you would expect the Chinese to use their SPAM infrastructure to spread cummunist propaganda, not penis enlargment e-mails. The commies have the power to shut those servers down. What are they waiting for? They put a filter to monitor and and control the people's access to the net. They can do the same with SPAM. Or, better yet, raid those locations where the servers are, find the spammers, put them all against the wall and frag them!
I set up my own mail server just so I wouldn't have to deal with all of the crap coming to my inboxes from foreign countries. (I am in USA). A simple iptables drop rule on countries overseas made my spam slow from 100+ per day down to around 10 a day. Additional filtering whittles that down much more.
And yes, I know that means people in China can't email me, but I only correspond with US folk right now because I don't know anybody over there...
Why not start blocking IP addresses for SMTP from China? Also start some sort of whitelist of known good STMP servers to help the legit email users in China. If the country can get (or doesn't care to) get spammers under control, like has happened in other counties, then the rest of the world should take matters into their own hands.
If China is really the source of much of it, we would see a dramatic decrease.
Or am I missing something?
Soccer Goal Plans
No blood for spam!
BTW: If you point out that Iraq wasn't behind 9/11, I will make a giant whooshing sound in reply.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
There are two distinct nations with "China" in their name: PROC (Mainland) and ROC (Taiwan). Titles should be more specific.
It was along the lines of "the capitalist countries will sell us the rope the hang them with". Those driven to financial gain eschewing possible ethical concerns will at best impose a lot of friction and drag on the system. They may end up poisoning the internet sufficiently to end a lot of net freedom we take for granted. I am sure China is more than happy to take our money as we bury ourselves.
I guess I know why all of my spam is unreadable now. And yes, I'd love to buy some v1a|gr4 or 1n|su&ranc3!
there was a tip posted to NANOG this morning. you can use china.blackholes.us as a RBL (look at their page, they have other lists) to effectively block all mail from china's IPs
So *this* explains all the poor grammar and strange marketing gimmicks in my spam.
And I, for one, welcome our new spam overlords.
I too have gotten tired of spam, and run my own mail server on my domain. I have complete control over my email, and complete control over the spam. I get less than 1% spam. However, it's sad that it has to come to that. Not everyone can run their own email servers. What about my mom or grandmother who can't even manage to set up their email account under M$ Outlook? For anyone who has the skill/interest, setting up your own email service is a good idea.
Several people have mentioned blocking all of China, but what good will this do? Okay, most of the spam originates from there, but this wouldn't be an interesting study if most of the spam were obviously from China. I would imagine that most spammers are using relays of some sort and have a pretty good idea what they are doing. The country-wide blacklist may not be a bad idea but I question its effectiveness.
Is anyone running Tarpit? http://www.expressive.ltd.uk/Tarpit.shtml
In theory it should help slow the process, thus tying up spam servers and making them generate less revenue by not sending out as many spams. If everyone that ran their own mail server attach this to their MTA, it may help.
Outside of that, if it's in China I don't see many other ways we can stop this.
CVBS
free ipod and free gmail!
it is that 71% of a form of communication originates from a country that tries its damndest to stifle the voice of its people.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
I just got spam in my fortune cookie.
lately seems to originate in Africa. Nigeria to be exact.
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Spam could be very useful in clogging the flow of all that nasty,free information on the net - something the Chinese government would just love to do.
It's a great plan, I must admit.
What I want to know is who's controlling them?Fifty bucks says that if you hack the Michigan public library servers, there are a *lot* of books on Chinese being checked out by Alan Ralsky.
Oh hell, who am I kidding. Everybody knows that's who's controlling the majority of them. I'm just hoping that Ralsky's two Chinese friends who got busted roll over on him and he gets nailed once and for all.
w00ps... channeling a little Sipowicz there. I'm surprised I didn't say "perp."
Spam, the food, is made right in our very own third world city of Austin, Minnesota at the Hormel plant. (also Nebraska, Denmark, Korea and The Phillipines.) See the Spam museum.
(Funny on slashdot how I have to qualify Spam as a food product...)
Have you Meta Moderated t
i mean china, the spam sends you!
If you put a credit card number into a site, what bank gets the transaction? That's how to track spammers.
Hormel, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!
This sig no verb.
Damn Commies!
Well. I have Computer Science degree a top ranking American University, and I'm from China, I guess that makes me a SPAMMER too.
Lots of open usenet servers in china - but how is their propogation? Lots of open mail relays, but I very much doubt the source of the spam are these machines in PROC.
YOU spam China!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Speaking of spam....
Want to buy prescription drugs for up to 50% off?
We sell prescription drugs such as Vicodin, Valium, Viagra, and Xanax for cheaper than any where else The best part is you don't need a prescription to order them and shipping is always next day so you will never be without the medicine you need. If you are interested just Click Here to go to our site. You will find what you need.
now i make up the other 30% woohoo
Strange, because USA is still #1 in all 3 categories listed (scroll down) on spamhaus.org
/me sets mode -rant
Besides - who cares where the exploited servers are? Soon (my guess is - less than 6 months) the majority of spams will be sent via zombies taken over by some worm or virus. These computers will be spread all over the world. The only solution is to nip it in the butt. Make spam illegal (as it is in Europe) and sue the pants of the spammers. Enough of those stupid atempts to pretend something is being done. We all know that the spammers are from Gods own country - hijacking machines whereever it's easiest.
90% of my spam gets filtered out just by looking for chinese characters on the subject header lines. I do not read chinese.
In communist China, spam censors YOU!
75% of spam is american. American lowlifes selling american products..
At least according to my own experience, and according to research conducted outside of america..
I don't believe for a minute that the spammers are actually chinese.. You can recognize the writing of a typical american "internet entrepeneur" in most spam mail..
And the servers? Sure, but most spam servers are innocent infected computers anyway...and if you look at the number of american computers in the world compared to the number of asian numbers..it would surprize me if the majority of servers aren't american..
I have never seen a single spam email with chinese letters..why?
Will code a sig generator for food
Spam may be coming from Chinese _servers_, but I doubt 71% of the spammers are Chinese. Everyone in this thread seems to think that actual Chinese people are doing the spamming. I don't think this is the case.
.
"Since Jan. 1, we've seen probably a 30% to 40% increase" in spam traffic" Commtouch CEO say"
This accurately mirrors what I've noted, I run the mail sweeper for a medium-sized enterprise and analyse spam to improve the quality of our filtering.
I note a lot of the spam has similar formats (apart from the 419 scammers, but they're easy to filter out), leading me to suggest that spamming is dominated by a relatively small clique of big-time mailers
This does at least make it easier to write rules to stop it. We don't use Bayesian filtering, a human-monitored system can be more efficient if done right.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I would be perfectly willing to not receive any e-mail from China, or even all of Asia for that matter. Unfortunately, not running my own mail server, I can't block their addresses direcly, but it would be nice if someone mapped out the IP addresses to block and came up with some good mail server rules. Clearly this would have to be done as an option on an acount-by-acount basis, so it has to be done in the mail server and not the firewall, but I expect enough people would opt-out of Chinese oriinated e-mail to make it worth while for any system that supported such an option and coul long-term have a significant impact on this source of spam.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And 99% of spammers are from America. Clean up your own act first.
... most of my email seems to be coming from these hot, single, girls that all want to meet ME! I blush everytime!
Hmmm.
Well, that explains why so much of spam is for penis enlargement products... :-p
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
..this isn't news at all. Can't say how many spams I've seen from them.
I didn't RTFA but did they point out that the vast majority of web sites that yon spam wants to send you to are also in China?
Time to start blocking off entire segments. Hell, pull the plug on the country.
First, they come and buy up much of the city in which I live. Then, they decide to circumvent local laws (buying and selling drivers' licenses, for example) because, after all, Canada isn't a "real" country compared to China. Third, they decimate our black bears for their ridiculous voodoo medicine. Fourth, they openly refer to us as "white barbarians" and "dog people", and often refuse to learn to speak the local language. And now, they are bombarding us with spam.
8 of the 10 most polluted cities on Earth are in China.
There is a huge rate of female infanticide.
Give me one good reason to actually like China.
Could it be because they are running pirated copied of Windows that have been hijacked by something?
How do I configure Spam Assassin to reject all email from China?
Thanks
And he still found time to run the World Trade Organisation and become Prime Minister of New Zealand too!
No tickee, no shirtee. Thanks. I'll be here all week...
Just last week some jerk from hinet.net started using my smtp server. I think he got a couple thousand messages off before I put an end to his shenanigans. Is there any form of retribution one can take against this behavior?
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
that's our michael, always being productive, whilst burning off TONS of calories from his whilrwind of activity!
if he sent just a tenth of the food he ate to africa, nobody would starve for a decade!
I guess Bush will now invade China.
This, of course, raises the question as to when Internet blockades become legitimate poltical tools... Should we cut China off the Internet until it cleans up its act? I don't agree, but I'm surprised that it hasn't occured to anyone yet.
blog |
With the recent spate of worms plus a lot of insecure computers
Coincidence, I think not.
Other countries should threaten to stop importing products from China (or impose high tariffs) unless the government stops SPAM from being generated there.
Once that's done, we'll have to move on to whatever country the spammers move to next.
Find the closes chinese emabassy and reforward your spam there. then keep moving the target to different agencies in case they block your IP. if enough people did it it would become a self moderating DOS attack.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
they block internet for their people because it's deemed dangerous to the state, but they happily let out crap... commie scum.
DUH? DUH! Sorry if that's been said already.
Rather reassuring, considering the context.
I actually started blocking a bunch of chinese IPs a long time ago. Now, I'm also getting a lot of spam from Brazil. I figure if we block both Brazil and China, spam volume might drop 80-90%.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Although spamvertised web sites themselves may be hosted in China, most of the hosts actually relaying spam are on American broadband connections (100% of these spamming zombies are running Microsoft Windows). And we still know that Americans are behind almost all the world's spam.
you cannot blocklist urls via smtp.
the spam isn't necessarily originating from there but rather the sites/relay sites are hosted there.
spam-vertising web hosters like srit.com.cn, chinanet.cn.net, china-network, and other violators house many of these sites and don't act to punish their spamming clients.
it's not just china but it's also korea, taiwan, lately japan and various former soviet-blok countries.
i can' think of anyway to block those spams out.
Our Chinese clients started complaining that they no longer had access to our US based FTP server and e-mail addresses just last week. Turns out, China blocked the DNS servers that our ISP uses! Great... yippee.
We are switching ISPs anyway, so I am not terribly concerned, I just think this is wildly hypocritical.
The 71% refers to the web sites the spam references. The spam itself is not coming from China, so blocking China at the MTA won't help. They didn't check to see if the web sites in China do a redirect elseware, though that's quite possible.
http://www.recipesource.com/ethnic/asia/chinese/sw eet-sour-spam1.html
1) The chinese secret police are trying to shut down web cafes.
2) They deliberatly host spammers.
3) World blacklists china.
4) political dissidents cant send mail even if they wanted to.
5) profit ??
90% of the spam I get is written in english, directed to an american market, advertising products sold by american companies.
Blocking all mail from the US would do far more to help me get rid of the spam problem than blocking china.
Most of the spams I receive are from companies in US or other English-speaking countries. The reason why many spams come from China is that there are many free email service providers there that give SMTP/POP access to users (unlike MSN and Yahoo, which only provide web access), so it's extremely easy to get a free account and start sending bulk emails.
Most likely 71% of high quality Counterfiet money comes from China also.
Do you work for that company!
"71% of all spam servers are located in this People Republic."
Where is the exact link to that quote?
Cut the Chinese off. Internet access is heavily restricted in China anyway.
But who says that Communists don't understand commerce?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Doesn't anyone read the article?
It said that 71% of the URLs in spam go to web servers in China, not that 71% of spam comes from China!
The vast majority of spam that hits my mail server comes from the US (comcast, rr.com, etc) machines that have been compromised.
Tools like bigevil.cf (SpamAssassin plugin) help me to filter those spams with Chinese URLs.
How is this insightful? He provides no evidence. He merely states a "fact."
You hate Asian people.
A coworker of mine basically black holed Asia, Africa, and South America for the county we were consulting with at the border router. The theory was that no one in this little county had any reason to be talking to anyone in any of those locations.
He was going to black hole Europe as well, but it seems like there was somebody over there that a county commissioner knew...
This not only killed most spam, but most attacks as well. I know this kind of blanket technique will not work for many orgs, but it worked well for them.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
*All* my spam still quotes prices in USD, and are written in English. The companies doing the spamming, and those they are spamming for, are most likely American.
Take them down, and you'll get some results. Start blocking IP addresses and eventually, you'll just be talking to yourself.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I recently moved my web site to a hosting company that allows me to use, along with a lot of other cool stuff, procmail filters. In one morning I learned enough about writing procmail rules to cut my daily spam amount from 1000 to 300 without risking false positives. (I have so far resisted using spamassassin, etc, preferring to use Mailwasher so I can quickly review what will be deleted.)
Following the links posted in this thread, I've been looking at the list of Chinese and Korean IP blocks at this site...
http://www.okean.com/asianspamblocks.html
What would be the best way for me to block any e-mails originating from within these blocks?
Can it be done (reliably) with procmail or is it possible for spammers to fake the originating IP address? Come to think of it, I don't even know if e-mail headers include an originating address.
Is it something that must be done at the time of connection from an SMTP server? Does procmail work its magic too far down the line?
Thanks for any help! Going from 1000 down to 300 spams per day was an experience like no other, so I would dearly love to reduce that number even further!
http://sophos.com/spaminfo/articles/dirtydozen.htm l
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
I mean, most of us are still using ipv4 and China only got something like 45 million ipv4 addresses. That is fewer than the combined total of IBM and Stanford. So what could we be missing out on anyway?
"DRM is like violence: if it doesn't work, use more."
sorry it always makes me mad to see stupid comments about China but China is such an easy target. Everybody can point their finger to China if they want to win free publicity.
"The U.S. has no shortage of people looking to blame China for America's economic problems. The flight of manufacturing jobs is China's fault."
No surprise, US always find some country to blame when something's wrong. Does this guy know that China lost more manufacturing job then US? I don't know what qualified him to write for BusinessWeek if that's what he knows about international economy.
"But Gideon Mantel, the head of an Israeli company that tracks e-mail traffic, says China is also a major source for another American ailment -- spam. "
I haven't find a way to confirm this information. Chinese computer workers are not very strong in computer security and that's why the spamers can find their way to take advantage of that. It's not a surprise that when people see negative things that related to China, they will point finger to the Chinese government.
Servers are cheapter in China? That's totally bullshit, guess what, I have a server in US and I am trying to sell hosting to China because it's cheaper here.
" The Commtouch team looked at the URLs embedded in the spam messages and then checked the IP addresses that those URLs pointed to -- and they clearly were Chinese. "
Never have chance to confirm this. I will be surprised that if readers here can find 70% of spam has URL hosted in China.
This article has too strong political voice, any people has some education should think twice...
First, lets use an M-1 Carbine to hunt 'em like rats!
After that, have the Three Shotgun Dudes shoot 'em up!
If the spammer is still kick'in, fire an RPG at 'em!
And finally, to finish 'em off, use these weapons of mass destruction!
Put whatever is left of the spammer on my back yard, and I'll have The Incredible Hulk drop off my roof and SMASH 'em!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
The web sites that are linked in spam are hosted in China, however, the country from which most spam originates (60.5%) is the USA only 6.2% originates in China. This article could have been easily named "60.5% of Spammers are located in the USA".
http://www.commtouch.com/news/english/2004/pr_0
Why do I never receive spam in Chinese? Is all spam directly only at English speaking suckers?
And where is this massive censor when WE need it.
you know how it showed that the US was the #1 spam country?
well that's prolly not because they're located here, (and this has rolly been said before, but hey, let me say my thing)
but becase of all the trojans that relay the spam to hide the original senders, namely ones based in China and India.
all that statistic showed a few months back is how incompetent the average US computer user really is. and also the fact we're also the majority computer users, and RR doesnt have good spam/trojan protection for its users.
the problem though is, China and India and other countries that allow this wont lift a finger to fix this, so it's gonna have to be the jobs of the isp's to install some aggressive anti-virus and spam filters (earthlink's are pretty strong when it comes to spam already) to start slowing the flow of spam. and up to corporate offices to install filters on their gateways to slow the flow of spam and virii.
That is the only think I can think of to slow the flow of spam from those countries, that and blacklisting.
I guess I shouldn't be suprised.
so, are spam emails typed in by 8 years olds working 14 hour days....like the Nike's?
In other words, you're saying that my newly placed porn-spam notifier will miss 71% of "the good stuff"!?! Red China, Soviet Russia... Ugh!
-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
You mentioned 'Bowling for Columbine' and 'truth' in the same post? That movie was wholescale propaganda and a hatchet job on the character of a whole lot of people. The quotes are mostly all taken out of context and presented in a manner that can only be characterized as a gross distortion of the facts in order to fit Michael Moore's far left political agenda. It has been thoroughly debunked point by point already. As for Americans not appreciating his talent, a lot of people who are far to the left of center politically do, but he'd be a lot more appreciated by the general population if he made an attempt to reach out to the rest of us and let the whole story support his views or not as the facts present themselves rather than just 'preaching to the choir'.
Come to think of it..
How many friends do I have in the US?
Hmmmmm. None. Ok. And where does the majority from the spam come from? There you have it.
My spam solution is to bounce ALL mail from the US.
Sorry guys...
Privacy is terrorism.
... is that those servers are used by spammers as open relay, not that those spams are originated there.
..."
..."
...
There're just too many clueless email admins over there. They lack the skills of configuring a well behaved MTA (it's a pretty tough job these days indeed), and the language barrier is just making things worse. Most of the people are just configuring their mail servers according to howto-like articles written by some clueful guys, and those articles are mostly just laying out the steps, no how and why things should work that way. If you hop to any of the tech forums' email section, you'll find it's full of questions like:
"Help, I just configured my email server according to XXX but things didn't work out
"Help, why my smtp auth doesn't work? It'll accept any username/password
"Help, why I can send out email by can't receive?"
"Help, I got blacklisted by XXX, how can I get myself out?"
etc., etc.
So, it's a matter of educating them how to do things right. As a Chinese myself, I am trying hard to help out those poor guys by answering questions on those forums, and by helping them out translating the documentations to Chinese.
So please, don't shut the door to them, they just need to be educated.
gd
Relevant portion of the file at iana.org:
... is that 71% of Spammers are located in Florida and they're just using servers in China.
Why does Florida seem to be a haven for shady businessmen?
It's a trojan, I tell you!!! .... or maybe not. But it acts exactly like one. The button labeled "Download" does not start a download -- it actually asks for your e-mail address so that they can e-mail you a paper about spam....
Tinfoil hat mode would say that they are simply harvesting e-mail addresses for a future spamming run. With my tinfoil hat off, it pegs the needle on my irony-meter.
Their report is available at http://www.brandenburg.com/reports/200404-isc-trip -report.htm
[1] /usr/share/doc/RFC/rfc*.txt | wc -l
$ grep -lw Crocker
570
Nothing good comes from China.
The crap they push through wally world is garbage and now they've extended their scope to spam.
Block the entire continent and block their ships from our ports. We don't want your TRASH...
Those are the people we should be going after. Spam, even under the recent federal law should be enforced against the people paying for the service.
Do you sell the penis pills advertised? Yeah? Did you request the advertisement? SLAM!
Forget about blocking all of China. I feel safe in the belief that it wouldn't stop the spam at all.
Well, it works like this:
1) The top spammers (the people) are from the USA.
2) They like to use relays (computers) in China, since most of the ISPs here don't like spammers and spamhauses (ISPs set up to do nothing but host spammers, they may even pretend to take down accounts while just shifting them to different ones, etc. Evil, really.)
3) They're also now using worm/virus-infected hosts as relays. I recently helped a friend clean out a rather nasty infestation which was being used as a spam relay without their knowledge, and which had been reported at SpamCop (this, I believe, was how we first found out about the evil relay, actually).
4) Oddly enough, today I got my first compliant spam under the FTC's rules. It actually had 'Sexually Explicit:' in the subject line unmunged. I was fairly impressed. Naturally, it was deleted immediately along with all other spam in the spamtrap.
5) Even if we don't get all (or very many of them), I think that the new spam law may do some good, though it surely won't stop spam. I would just love it if we could take out the top dozen or so US spammers, which would decrease the spam volume by an order of magnitude, I should think. Spam relays don't send spam on their own, folks (at least, not yet... hrm, hope I don't give them any ideas...). Even if the law doesn't really do much of anything, I still wouldn't mind seeing spammers in jail...
As a follow-up, 95% of all port-scans and attacks (not counting windoze viri/worms) come from IP's in the APNIC. I've decided to just tarpit them all for everything except http/https. (Who'da thunk, posting to slashdot and I got an intelligent idea! :-)
* a tour guide walks through the SPAM museum with a tour group, and points to a can on a pedestal *
This is the first can of spam that was ever produced by Hormel. It was made in 1937 in Austin, Minn.
Not too long after, it was shipped in mass quantities to Allied forces in Europe, who found it a delicious alternative to starvation.
*Picks up the can on the pedestal, pops it open, sticks a fork in and takes a bite. *
Mmmm. Fresh as the day it was made!
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Simple, uncomplicated techniques to stop a lot of spam.
Read about it here.
As a result, I may soon start looking around for rbls of zombie PCs, or consider running a bot to sniff these out myself. Thumb in the dike? Sure, but it beats doing nothing.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Is there any law that says we can't organize and attack/protest spammers?
I'm getting spam from the BTP group (407-398-6630)
You've got to read their page to believe it:
http://www.certainassured.com/
What's to keep us from all calling the number above and protesting?
Consequently... In sendmail is there a way to block a range of IPs with the access.db?
Can I block 208.192.0.0-208.255.255.255?
whois 208.254.73.12
UUNET Technologies, Inc. UUNET1996B (NET-208-192-0-0-1)
208.192.0.0 - 208.255.255.255
The BTP Group, Inc. UU-208-254-73 (NET-208-254-73-0-1)
208.254.73.0 - 208.254.73.127
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Ultimately, I think we'll need smarter spam filters. That isn't too different than what we were doing at HNC. IF the letter is from someone you don't know and talks about Human growth hormone or altering of bodily parts, it is a pretty good bet it is spam. It is really just a matter of good pattern recognition.
You are allowed to ban whomever you like. There are servers I control that are accessable from as little as one subnet (and others that are on a physically private network). That's my right.
It also could work to help force people to get their shit straight. Many ISPs (domestic and foriegn) are just non-responsive to SPAM/hacking complaints. One proven tactic that works is the threat of mass bans. Between a proposed UPD and a ban by the members of Nanog, UUNET was convinced to become more responsive to complains of network abuse.
The Internet does not have a police force so the community polices itself. If a group won't play by the rules, they shouldn't be supprised to find themselves excluded from a large part of it.
I hear complaints all the time about how much censorship of the Internet is done by the Chinese government, then what do we do? We add all of China to our RBLs to block the spam, and end up blocking what legitimate e-mail does get through. Sounds like we are doing just what the Chinese government wants us to.
-Pascal
Many of the comments here are anti-China, which we can understand, because SPAM is so much hated by all of us.
However, there is differentiator that needs to be made here: how many of these servers are actually run by spammers, vs. how many are hijacked by spammers without the owners' consent?
Isn't this an over generalization that demonizes entire people like: "All Arabs hate us!" or "All terrorists are Muslims!" or "All Jews are evil!"?
Another point is a differentiation between the people and the government. What the government does is not necessarily the same as what the people want or like.
Think about how G. W. Bush is behaving abroad (in your name) and even domestically, and ask yourself do you want everything he does to be actually in your name.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
as soon as I have some spare time I will find out all the IP ranges and just throw them outta my sendmail config...
... I do not have any friends/family/business in china, so any mail from those IP ranges can go to hell ....
.procmailrc) so people who I host mail for can enable or disable it depending on their taste ..
.... ...
not fair ?
I think it is
I use spamassasin (running from
ps: well I'm in costa rica, and half of the IP ranges are in some kind of spam database, including the one I share with some-hundred behind the NAT subscribers
well no the local ISP is kicking spammers butt, and as other people will go my way and just ban china the ISP (=government!?) might consider doing the same
honestly, I might even block spammer IP-s to my websites, because all I get is just email address spiders (and fraudelant PPC clicks )
that return as SMTP agents burying me under XANAX and Buy a university certificate bullcrap UCB SPAMHELL
You fucking moron... it's not just asian countries. APNIC is also Australia and NZ. Just because South Korea has high broadband uptake (and therefore lots of zombied windows machines) don't fuck it up for everyone.
grrrrr people like you make me homicidal.
Here is my list of spams by country. The only country that shows up excessively is the US. I can't block them because I and most all of my friends live here.
"AE" 3,"AR" 13,"AT" 13,"AU" 176,"BE" 14
"BR" 102,"CA" 108,"CH" 17,"CL" 6
"CN" 186 (Oops, 186, not 185),
"CY" 1,"DE" 34,"DK" 9,"DZ" 1,"EC" 2,"EE" 3
"EG" 4,"ES" 32,"EU" 145,"FI" 4,"FR" 32
"GB" 33,"GR" 3,"HK" 39,"HU" 13,"ID" 2
"IL" 27,"IN" 13,"IR" 2,"IT" 14,"JO" 1
"JP" 54,"KE" 1,"KG" 1,"KH" 1,"KR" 239
"LK" 1,"LT" 1,"LU" 3,"LV" 1,"LY" 1
"MT" 1,"MX" 20,"MY" 3,"NG" 1,"NL" 30
"NO" 4,"NZ" 6,"PH" 2,"PK" 2,"PL" 22
"PT" 6,"QA" 1,"RO" 2,"RU" 18,"SA" 1
"SE" 11,"SG" 7,"SI" 11,"SK" 4,"TH" 3
"TR" 3,"TW" 29,"US" 1333,"UY" 29,"VE" 1
"XX" 508
XX = unidentified country in my lookup table.
Coding Blog
Hrm. You've just annoyed a HELL of a lot of Kiwis and Aussies. :(
Prisoner #655321
You do realise that you also just blackhold large portions of Australia and New Zealand, which don't fall into the 'Asian Spam Generator' area, don't you?
Of course, you probably don't care. But don't pretend for a second that what you are doing is 'Intelligent' in any way - it's simply blocking your ears and going "la la la la" when instead you could be doing something useful.
Actions like yours just make it hard for the millions of people who use the Internet for valid reasons in those netblocks.
71% of Spam Servers are Located in China
That's funny because 100% of my spam servers (i.e. both of them) are located right here under my desk whish is most certainly not in China...
(Posting as AC for obvious reasons.)
...the upcoming generation of middle-class kids have a larger proportion of decent folks amongst them, so things are getting better.
Re: the littering -- they treat their own country like a big waste--bin and toilet bowl (then expect others to respect their country), I'm not surprised they do the same to other's countries too. I doubt they even think about what theyare doing.
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
Even if that were true, 71% of servers sending spam does not necessarily mean that they account for the same amount of spam messages in our mboxes. It takes only a single mail server on an OC-12 or OC-48 network to counter thousands (!) of servers on 56k lines that are very common in China!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
One of my colleage foreign teachers here in China came to me complaining her MS-Word documents wouldn't open anymore. I ran some AV software over her system and found just over 100 infections covering around 30 viruses, including 4 backdoors and a mail transport agent.
I can guarentee that just about every computer connected up to the University broadband is similar. The network grinds to a halt from 8am onwards as people come in to work and switch on their office/classroom systems.
I'm working on trying them to get some REAL AV software installed across the campus (instead of the snakeoil one the Universities around here all use because it is cheap). It is a slow process -- they are happy to spend 2millionRMB on a new front gate because they think it will improve the status of the univesity (it's an ugly, tacked-together monolith that doesn't match the other buildings), but spend money on things related to a better teaching/learning environment?? No further comment!
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
-Lucas
I think more spam comes from Korea than China these days, but many of the APNIC networks are havens for spam, so if you have no business with China, Korea or other nearby areas, you can block the whole lot of them out and force legit systems in that IP space to contact you for whitelisting.
/etc/access
c t:221
This is easy to do with Sendmail:
connect:61 550 blacklisted IP - visit http://mysite.com for whitelist instructions
connect:211 " etc
connect:218
connect:219
connect:220
conne
People freak out at the prospect of blacklisting an entire class A, but it works. Legit systems (if any, which are few and far between unless you're doing business with China) can visit a web page and specify their IP address to be whitelisted. In the meantime, you free up lots of resources and tell the spammers Buh-Bye before they even start their uploading of junk e-mail.
whats the chineese ipv4 address range?
that should make life easy for my spam filter
On the bright side, if they can make a law against it in China, it'll ensure long, torturous deaths for spammers.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
I'm blocking China and Korea. Both of them.
h tml for a small placative explanation of at least one admin who had enough.
China mainly because they don't freaking care about spam.
Korea because of their abysmal network security record.
Read http://snoop.alphanet.ch/?q=antispam/china-korea.
According to this month's issue of CPU (Computer Power Users), over 50% of spam seen by a US based research company originated from the US. The next closest was under 10%. Could it be that Chinese spam is aimed at everyone but us?
after reading the posted messages, I am just outrageous. I wanna shout at you guys, most of you. Before you talk evil about china, ask ourself, how much do you know about our country. And for the taiwan friends, please, stop messing with them. When they are abusing chinese, they shot at anyone related to HUangDi and YanDi. Living and insolated in that small piece of earthquake-dangered island, governed by the Big Fraud is not giving any of you the credit. On the contrary, only by sticking together with all the chinese will you bear a chance to live with pride. Well, back to the westerners. Believe me, most of the things you saw and you heard is outdated even if from last night's news. Why, we are developing fast and you are in the state we were 150 years ago. the meaning is, when you start ingoring other power, thinking you're the best, you are only steps to the crisis. if you wanna talk about china, ok, talk about it. Don't judge by the stupid stereotypes the stupids cast on you. As for those Spam servers , I am sorry. I am a victim as you are. But look at those craps, what for? all western stuff. Who lies behind is obvious. And last but not least, compared with the way western people collects the treasure by killing and invading, this crime is so light. And we at most are a Mr. Accomplice, who should be blamed yet only account for a small portion of the guilt.
ÃÃÑÏÌìÌìÏòÉ 7;
71% of spam originates from China
yet...
80% of the worlds spammers operate from the USA?
Maybe non-tech people will finally start drawing the connection on how spam is delivered.
Then again maybe pigs will fly too...
The problem, as I understand it (as I've heard here[1] a few times), is that most of Asia has a different culture to the US, and they don't see anything at all wrong with spam.
..
/. seem to assume, 'here' does not automatically mean 'US' - in this case, 'here' is China.
Just like they don't see anything wrong with shitting on the streets, spitting, smoking when others are eating, not putting their hands over their mouths...etc etc etc.
I don't think blackholing will work in the long term - it will come to the point where the US needs to talk with China. The best approach is to change technology so that open relays are impossible.
[1]no, unlike what most people on
Yeah, real intelligent.
Don't bother spending 30 seconds actually doing it by country and hence significantly reducing the size of the tarpit while still blocking 95% of the garbage.
Just blow away the entire pacific. Way to treat those who stood up and sent troops for the "war on terror"...
I run a mail server in china... ...so, someone care to point me at a set of instructions for making sure it cannot be used as an open relay?
So what class A should I block with my firewall?
I don't know anybody in China. Maybe, if I had a list of the email servers, I could block 71% of my spam.
I guess the Great Firewall of China isn't doing it's job then. Maybe we need one on our end instead. :-)
troll! OMFG, TROLL!! OMG, tHe TwIttEr iS On THE spoke!!!!
As much as it will personally inconvenience me here in China, I really would like lots of banning of SPAMing Chinese IP addresses. It is the only way to make the ISPs and Government take the matter serious. They are happy to have money to come into China from foreigners paying them to send out SPAM, while the legitimate Chinese internet user suffer with very poor connection speed from the flood of SPAM traffic from both corruption ISPs and zombie computer. The internet here is mostly can't use. Even when I pay for broadband.
Maybe if you can just ban traffic from Windows machines from China (I know you can tell this for web requests unless user has explicitly disabled it, but I don't know about email). That would at least silence all the zombie computer that clog our internet, if it could be done.
Please be cruel to us to be kind.
Agree with most of what you said except the bit:
"Why, we are developing fast and you are in the state we were 150 years ago."
Believe me. Chinese society started 4000 years earlier than the modern West and has been in catch-up since the 1800's. Yes, I live in China as well as the West and base my opinion on DIRECT observation of both. I am neither Chinese or a Westerner and am not particularly fond of either culture.
The above quote is based on a very old stock nationalistic slogan and carries as much sense as "Australia is the clever country" (A popular and observably unlikely political propoganda piece) or "The US is the land of the free" (maybe before the multinationals got hold of its government by the hip pocket it was).
China said it when the Brits. knocked on the door at HK and were blown away (quite literally) by the advanced state of the "'barbarians'" weaponry (not that that speaks very well of the Brits -- and others -- for doing it in the first place). Every imperial dynasty said it before the Monguls and other similar tribes came in and took control until they grew soft and started mouthing the same meaningless platitudes to their egos and it was time for the next lot to come in and do the same to them. If the current imperial dynasty is saying it today, than it is likely time for another meaningless shift in power to a new self-imposed elite (my money is on the same multinationals now controlling the US -- Chinese consumers are ripe for the picking).
China's development is fast in certain narow (and incidentally environmentally and socially destructive) directions. The only thing you are doing faster than the west is killing your country faster than they are killing theirs by copying all their mistakes.
Private car ownership level is not a sign of development. A reliable, clean, uncrowded, cheap public transport system is. So is a weather-protected bicycle path and communities set up to not require huge daily commuting distances. China had these before but has lost them in a sulphur-enriched photochemical smog.
When you criticise others, please stick to real facts, not children's bedtime stories told for the benefit of geriatric Party Officials. You might find people take your more serious points more... seriously.
You must be fucking kidding!!!
Most spam is from comcast.net. Or a few other US cable/adsl providers, period.
People arguing that 71% comes form china are trying to cover up the real deal...
Or go to Australia or the US and be bored to death on unemployment benefit. At least China is giving me a job.
BTW: I went through your list. Unfortunately, I can't deny any of it, though you have pulled worst-case situations* - yes, there are many toilets as described, but many spotlessly clean ones too. And there is a large minority of perfectly nice middle-class Chinese about. I would even say that amongst the up-coming generation they are a healthy majority (I don't think I'd place the original thread poster in that group, but s/he may just be upset). The last generation got hold of some money after decades of poverty, so an "I'm now the emperor" attitude is probably to be expected. They'll get over it.
And if you want REALLY obnoxious self-superiority, hang out in a foreigners' bar here for a few hours. I'm sometimes embarrassed to be a foreigner.
I'm not sure about the rope instead of iron reinforcing, but it rings true in the context of a small number of very dodgy contractors that usually end up being shot for criminal negligence endangering (or, sadly, taking) lives. A half-constructed building across the road from where I work here in Qingdao half collapsed, and every night the following week the local construction sights were waving huge, long, loud strings of firecrackers off the ends of all their construction cranes.
Bad engineering? Corrupt materials suppliers? Lack of competent safety inspectors? Nah!, must be evil spirits. This will scare 'em off!
No joke!
I do worry about how Olympic athletes will take to air so sulfur-rich you can feel it burning your nasal lining. They may have Beijing cleaned up by then, but only if they start heavily restricting car use in the city (like a lot of Western cities are having to do now), and I don't see that happening.
Chinese always tell me how beautiful Sydney was on the telly in 2000. Well, yes, the bit shown on the telly was. There are parts of Sydney I can't tell from the back of Shenyang (before they started cleaning the place up at an unbelievably impressive rate).
I notice here in Qingdao there are a lot of bus stop shelters made of large tinted glass panels. They have been there for several months and look very nice. Then I wonder how many hours such a thing would last in the West before someone put a brick through it.
--------
* you under-estimated brothels (or maybe I underestimate the number where you come from - I'm from semi-rural Australia), at least in the city centers: many are half-disguised but a colleague once pointed out what to look for from the bus (no I will not tell the slashdot readership - that is one business China does NOT need any more of!). I have trouble believing there is such a great need. Good grief, it's just using someone else's body to masturbate with. Use your hand for cripes sake!
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
Chinese who have never left their own country and have not a clue what it is like out in the real world are just as bad as Americans who have never left their own country and have not a clue what it is like out in the real world.
and sure enough...100% of the websites spam-vertised in my daily deluge are hosted in either china or korea.
Is it 5:30 yet?
United States, 56.74%
Canada, 6.80%
China (including Hong Kong), 6.24%
But this "thespamweblog" article from November 2003 shows:
The same source report (along with sources of digital attacks was mentioned in theInquirer. I'm sure if I kept tracking links in google, I'd find other reports and other percentages.
Maybe recent US lawsuits have, within a few months, forced most spammers off shore or perhaps it's just part of the offshoring of US [SPAMMER] jobs.
;-/
In regards to my sig, a bit of dark thoughts: imagine if China became a strict Moslem nation. If stealing incurs the lost of a hand, I could see the penalty for sending spam to be the loss of one finger for each separate mailing. Of course the worker would be fined and their boss. Eventually that might make a dent in spam. >:=}>
-l
Blacklist the entire IP range assigned to the .cn suffix.
When was the last time you got ham mail from *@*.cn?
This post made with the Dvorak layout.
"Friends don't let friends use QWERTY"