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

Use blacklists...

[grub]

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.

Re:Use blacklists...

[tacocat]

You didn't read the article did you?

It doesn't claim that the source of spam is 71% China. It claims that the indicated web server in the spam is located in China 71% of the time.

You can blacklist the entire Asian world and you won't guarantee any reduction in spam itself.

Challenge - Response is the most fucked up solution I've ever seen. I tried and it got spammed heavily for using it. It doesn't work. It's a resource pig and it pisses a lot of people off.

The problem isn't Asia or anyone else. The problem is that SPAM makes people money to the tune of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER YEAR. There is no way you will ever turn the tide of that financial force with an RBL or a Challenge-Response solution. It will take more than that.

Unfortunately it will probably cost all of us a lot of money and a lot of freedoms. I hope I'm wrong.

blacklist the netblocks?

[apachetoolbox]

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?

Firewalling?

[essiescreet]

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?

This may seem like an easy answer...

[peterdaly]

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?

Word to that...

[Adam Booth]

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.

Bullshit

[nnnneedles]

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?

just say NO

[frovingslosh]

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.

Re:So why not blackhole the entire country?

[Grax]

I can't speak for the accuracy of the assertion that the web servers linked to in spam messages are located in China 71% of the time.

But I can say that of 3413 spam messages I received only 185 of them came from China.

Re:would tarpit help?

[WoodstockJeff]

The problem with tarpitting is that it only ties up ONE PROCESS in the spammer server. A good server will have multiple delivery threads, and you'd have to tarpit all (or most) of them to affect the server significantly.

That said, our system takes 2 minutes to ACK requests after the first error, expanding to 10 minutes/error, just before it hangs up at 20 errors. It isn't much, but it makes ME feel better.

The reason

[mldqj]

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.

Re:How Ironic

[glenalec]

Sadly, this isn't too far off the truth. That's from someone living here the past 5 years.

Keep in mind, also, that the Chinese you see as tourists are the rich ones (the ones living like kings) and they are the REALLY obnoxious ones (with a few exceptions). Having money is the only goal of most people around here and they don't understand or respect anything else. If you are rich enough to own a car (and hence choke the atmosphere for your own grandchildren) over here, you are a mini-emperor and you expect all people on bicycle or foot to clear away from your blaring horn and bow down to your superior wealth. Then you will drive to the zoo for an afternoon of laughter at spitting at the monkeys (the monkeys have learned to spit back, which really is funny). Barbarians with cash -- middle-class Chinese (with a few exceptions).

You want to see an extremely class-stratified society? Here it is!

Of course, 70% of the foreigners living over here make me cringe over their obnoxious attitudes and behaviour too.

Re:How Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sadly, this isn't too far off the truth. That's
> from someone living here the past 5 years.

Yes, but, to some degree, it is reasonable. People in the west have learned to take what they read with a pinch of salt, but that is not as true here - people tend to beleive what they read. So it seems more reasonable to limit what people can read, especially the crap that comes from the west.

Remember that China is advancing much more quickly than western countries did, and in moving 'forward' [1] they have problems the west didn't have.

I think there is at least an argument to be made for controlled advancement, which is the way I choose to see it.

[1] I sometimes wonder whether 'forward' is the right word. In a lot of ways, yes, the west is more advanced than China, but in some significant ways, I think not. In moving forward so fast, China runs the risk of only adopting the worst parts of western culture - like rampant materialism, prostitution etc. - and not the better parts.

(yes, I also live in China)