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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."
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
Does the story differentiate between the two?
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
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.
Doesn't matter. The source machine is all I care about. If it's in China I don't care if the spammer is American, Chinese or Martian.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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."
If you put a credit card number into a site, what bank gets the transaction? That's how to track spammers.
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.
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.
.
>I [...] run my own mail server on my domain.
>Not everyone can run their own email servers. What about my mom or grandmother
Why don't you give them e-mail accounts on your domain and they'll get spam-free e-mail.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
So, what's holding us off from just blackholing the entire country until they get their political act together?
i think thats a horrible idea, it could possibly silence the best form of free speech the people there have.
besides, if some other country was to blacklist US based servers, purely because of the US's politics, im sure everyone would be crying foul. You shouldn't let politics dictate what happens with the internet.
That might be because the food product is properly called SPAM. (Follow your own links!)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
There's just something that seems fundamentally wrong about connecting to a global network and then blacklisting half of it.
It's like buying Lucky Charms cereal, then filtering out all the marshmallows and throwing them in the garbage because they're not healthy. Very true, but if that's how you feel, why bother buying Lucky Charms?
Surely it would be more effective to implement challenge-response, or simply boycott email in favour of IM or a secure messageboard/contact form, or whatever you prefer. The problem is with email, not with Asia.
Besides, I think this study is bogus. All the studies I've previously seen pointed squarely at the USA as the primary source of spam. Empirical evidence from my own email box bears this out. Most of the spam I receive tends to come from residential cable modem/DSL lines in various countries, predominantly the states. I suspect that these are either virus-hijacked boxes, or people being paid to send spam through their home connection (ie, the ads placed on telephone polls: "Have an internet connection at home? Make up to $4,000/month with no effort required! Call now!")
Random and weird software I've written.
Taiwanese servers use the tw code, cn is used by the Reds. It's not technically hard to disambiguate the two countries-- so the question then becomes-- did the authors of the study at some point take the "One China" myth seriously?
No. This is a common misunderstanding. The majority of spammers are from the US.
A lot more money to be made in China then ever in Iraq - oil and all. I was just reading about the Vegas-style casinos going into Macau (which is and isn't China like Hong Kong) that are going to generate billions of dollars for US based companies. We've already read about Ciscos work there and there are plenty of other companies getting their foot into that door. Think about it 1.3 billion people and only 200 million phones (land and cell).
How about reading the story?
They are talking about the Peoples Republic (of China), captial Beijing, "China is notorious for its Internet censorship efforts".
This doesn't sound like they are talking about Taiwan/Republic of China, (provisional) capital Taipei.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
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.
Except, it's more like buying a box of lucky charms expecting to find marshmallows and the regular oats (or whatever it is) cereal and finding a bunch of dirty needles in it as well. SPAM is not supposed to be a part of the web. It's an unwelcome, criminal blight on it and it's being perpetrated by people who are actively trying to ruin a good thing for everyone else. I find it perfectly acceptable that these people be relegated to their own corner and thrown off the web.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Why on earth would anyone be amazed? The /10's and /12's you give cover MILLIONS of computers. Of course you're going to get lots of hits. The addresses probably contain millions of dynamically assigned addresses that get assigned to compromised machines..... Just like everywhere else on the planet that has internet.
Try blocking dynamic ranges and you'll probably do as well. Probably better because you'll end up blocking all the dynamic DSL connections from the big guys in North America like Comcast, Verizon and Bell etc.
You may find it perfectly acceptable now, but what about if they turn around and start doing the same thing to us? I, for one, don't even find it acceptable as a one-way thing. People in Asian countries have as much right to email me as anyone else. Isolationist tactics will destroy the internet as we know it, and negate much of the good that it has done and is doing around the world. This is not the path we want to go down. It's a poor solution, and it's certainly not the right solution.
Random and weird software I've written.
Oh baloney. There are a bunch of open relays in China, so block them. If the admin's too dumb to close the relay, that's the admin's problem and we shouldn't suffer for their inability to maintain their server properly. In fact, I support blacklisting ANY open relay that's being used by spammers regardless of what country it's in.
Besides, you don't have to block them altogether. You can blacklist the IP blocks in your mail server and not in your web server. If the IP block can't use e-mail responsibly, I see no reason to let them be a part of my section of the e-mail chain. It's my house, and if I don't want to let you in, I'm not going to. All the better if I actually have a good reason to keep you out, such as your past abusive behavior.
The Internet's not some big, hippy love-in where we have to be completely tolerant of every imbecile's idiotic behavior just to avoid confrontation. Stomp on my toes, I'll break your nose. Deal with it.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
... is that those servers are used by spammers as open relay, not that those spams are originated there.
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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:
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 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
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.
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.
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...