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."

Comments

The Great (fire)Wall of China

[kent_eh]

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?

Re:Use blacklists...

[grub]

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.

How Ironic

[2names]

it is that 71% of a form of communication originates from a country that tries its damndest to stifle the voice of its people.

Re:How Ironic

[Stephen Samuel]

China is not trying to stifle the voices of their people as much as it is trying to prevent them from reading certain things. Supressing speech inside of China is simply an easy way to limit what people can read.

They don't really care that much about what the outside world can read about China, as long as that information doesn't get back into the country.

Another source

[broothal]

Strange, because USA is still #1 in all 3 categories listed (scroll down) on spamhaus.org
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.
/me sets mode -rant

Don't jump so quickly on the Chinese

[smr2x]

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.

Re:Why block China?

[Otter]

Reply to you and the 10 other people saying this -- it's not a question of moral blame, it's a question of a technical solution. If you have no reason to expect mail from a .cn domain, then blocking all .cn mail makes a huge dent in your spam problem. The fact that the spammer might be your next-door neighbor is irrelevant.

I face a *huge* spam problem, mostly from .ru, and dumping everything from that domain makes an enormous difference.

Re:Use blacklists...

[Cecil]

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!")

Re:Taiwan

[Jeremy Erwin]

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?

Re:Use blacklists...

[the_mad_poster]

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.

What's really happening out there ...

[gd]

... 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.