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71% of Spam Servers are Located in China

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the why-can't-that-wall-work-both-ways dept.

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."

30 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Obligitory.... by Rooked_One · · Score: 4, Funny

    Isn't 71% of everything made in China? I've always thought all spam, both meat and annoyance flavors, were made in China...

    1. Re:Obligitory.... by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Funny

      Meat-flavored spam? I might actually like it...

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
  2. Avoid the Noid, he ruins web experiences by ericspinder · · Score: 4, Informative
    The direct link want your e-mail address (*shudder*)
    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.
    1. Re:Avoid the Noid, he ruins web experiences by Yokaze · · Score: 5, Informative

      Question: How does "71% percent of spam servers are located in China" quoted in the article correlate with the whitepaper stating "Figure 1: North America and International Spam Messages Sent Daily" depicting 2005: North America 8.5 billion, International 11 billion?

      Maybe it is in the subtle difference of spam messages sent, and servers used to send them.

      --
      "Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
  3. Use blacklists... by grub · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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,
    1. Re:Use blacklists... by grub · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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,
    2. Re:Use blacklists... by Bob+Zer+Fish · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just for other people's info... since I didn't know:
      Tarpitting discourages spamming without permanently blocking an offending IP address. Tarpitting works by monitoring traffic and applying sluggish responses to remote IPs showing spam-like behavior. For example, if an IP sends too many messages to users during an email session, tarpitting starts slowing MDaemon's response. If the spam-like behavior includes excessive unknown addresses during a session, the remote server can be suspended from access for a user-specified amount of time.

    3. Re:Use blacklists... by Cecil · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
    4. Re:Use blacklists... by Mysticode · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's not going to help too much. According to the article, 71% of the URLs appearing in spam messages point to websites hosted in China however 60% of spam messages are sent from the US. In fact, China (although second) is only the location of the mail servers sending about 6% of the spam messages that they analyzed. The post was not too clear on that but the source article is.

    5. Re:Use blacklists... by OrangeTide · · Score: 5, Funny

      Spam is all Bush's fault. I didn't get this much spam when clinton was president. And when Carter was president I didn't get any spam at all!

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    6. Re:Use blacklists... by the_mad_poster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!
  4. The Great (fire)Wall of China by kent_eh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Great by crumbz · · Score: 5, Funny


    Yet another IT service being outsourced overseas........

    Write your congressperson and demand that SPAM jobs be kept at home!

  6. That's the thing... by daeley · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  7. Old Joke by nightsweat · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  8. blackholes by Feyr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  9. How Ironic by 2names · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:How Ironic by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --
      Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  10. Another source by broothal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  11. Bullshit by nnnneedles · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  12. Re:blacklist the netblocks? by benzapp · · Score: 4, Informative

    Check out this site

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    I don't read or respond to AC posts
  13. Don't jump so quickly on the Chinese by smr2x · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    .
  14. just say NO by frovingslosh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  15. Re:So why not blackhole the entire country? by Grax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Coding Blog
  16. That's funny because... by Mz6 · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... most of my email seems to be coming from these hot, single, girls that all want to meet ME! I blush everytime!

    --
    Hmmm.
  17. ahhh...so clear now... by justforaday · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  18. Re:Why block China? by Otter · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  19. Re:Taiwan by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  20. RTFA! by koehn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  21. What's really happening out there ... by gd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... 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