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Russia, China World's Biggest Spammers
An anonymous reader writes "According to this ZDNet article, The Spamhaus Project has warned that organised cirminal gangs in Russia are supplying U.S.-based spammers with details of compromised PCs that can be manipulated to send junk mail. According to Spamhaus director Steve Linford, the Russian gangs aren't constrained by any anti-spam or cybercrime laws in their home country and have no respect for legislation implemented in other countries. Also, apparently 70 percent of spam is sent from China by American spam outfits who in turn have hosting arrangements with Chinese ISPs."
User end filters are a necessity these days, and even then, I still spend at least 15 min each day dealing with the spam. My personal box - No One else knows the address, it is for my own internal network purposes, is chock full of the stuff.
What do other slashdot'ers do? What can we hope to see in the near future?
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
If 70% 70 percent of spam is sent from China by American spam outfits, wouldn't that make the US the biggest spammer?
-- SYS 64738 --
Evil Russian spammers! Chinese spammers want to take down America!
And yet, in both cases there is plenty of demand from within the States. If it ain't rich kids experimenting, it's poor kids escaping with drugs from South America or Asia. If it's not a "bulk emailer" in California, it's a "clever marketer" in Florida sending millions of unsolicited email via servers in Russia or China.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That title is wrong.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Headline should read, US Spammers using services of Chinese ISPs, Russian mob. The Spam originates here, and ends up here. The vast majority of Spam is in English, and targeting an American audience.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Really? That contradicts this story posted just two days ago:
The Register is reporting a study by Sandvine.com that blames Microsoft Zombies for 80% of all spam.
So which is it, then?
or 1. people could just stop being assholes.
or 2. people could just stop reading it and buying the junk.
i would rather my first solution happens, because as a side effect there wouldnt be any more assholes. number two wont happen, because sometimes you just want to see if it really will make your junk bigger. your idea is GREAT, but... i dont really know what the new paradigm would be.
You know in the past month I have seen that 80% of Spam is caused by infected PC's in Windows. That 80% of Spam comes from China. That 70% come from Russia and China. That the US accounts for 60% of Spam. That Eastern Europe Accounts for 60% of Spam. So from this I know that there is 80+80+70+60+60= 350% Spam. This also tells me that Russia accounts for Negative 10% of Spam. Don't believe me, take this The Reg Story, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/trojan_spa m_study/, This one, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/25/spam_delug e/ and thats just El Reg. The only conclusive thing I have been able to determine is that these stories are worse than spam, not only are they useless, but we actually read these stories.
The USA is quite obviously the source of the spam. It is up to the USA to legislate in some way to stop the flood of spam that is hurting people all over the world. The real question is: how do you stop the spam when it is being sent from countries like China where the USA has no power to arrest spammers?
Well I think I have a possible solution and it can be illustrated by a case study. In Australia we had an international Paedophilia problem, Paedophiles were travelling to countries like Thailand where sex with children was not illegal and thus were not getting arrested. The solution that was eventually found was new laws whereby anyone who broke Australia's anti-paedophile laws could be arrested no matter where the offence was enacted. Offenders were met at the airport by police and arrested for crimes in other countries and the problem of "paedophile sex tourism" was solved.
My Solution to spam is similar. The USA needs to pass laws allowing them to track down the companies and individuals that are using the Chinese spam services and arrest them. Make the law such that sending spam is illegal no matter which country it is sent from. The spammers might get so scared they will stop Spamming
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
That is the other (electronic) Russian Mafia. Unlike the dumb Italian teamstears who beat people with baseball bats, some of these guys are very skilled and intelligent. The counterparts of many American geeks in Russia couldn't find a well paying job, have plenty of time, and nowadays on the Internet, they have access to all the technical information they need on any subject. They will use the best asset they have, their brain, to make money or build recognition for themselves. And the way the laws are shady there they think they can get away with anything as long as its online. If spam will make a couple of hundred rubles - they'll get into spam, if they can extort money from banks by compromising their webservers, they will do that. How do I know all this? I grew up in those part and still visit friends and family once in a while...
do any of the current anti-spam laws allow prosecution even when the spam is sent from another country? Because that is what I think is needed. I assume that it is currently sent from china because you can get arrested for sending if from the USA, make sending spam from anywhere an arrestable offence.
The source of the spam is ultimately in the United States. Using a foreign network to route spam serves to make the spammers harder to track and catch, but not impossible. The truth is, most of the largest spammers are easily trackable and can likely be proven guilty of numerous laws, whether they use foreign servers or not. The problem is it's a very low priority for law enforcement authorities unless, for example, the spammers mailbomb The GAP or Macdonald's company headquarters... then there'd be hell to pay.
Another problem is District Attorneys in most states in the United States have no interest in prosecuting spammers. Either they are ignorant or apathetic, but numerous spammer criminal cases have been presented to authorities for prosecution only to have them turned down.
PS "cirminal": Jesus, Timothy, you're actually paid to edit this?
Surely the easier solution is to charge the companies who are advertising their products via spam, not the elusive spammers themselves. Two good reasons are:
1) The spam obviously has to have a link back to the vendor in order to make sales.
2) If there is no demand for it, spam will stop.
As many around here have pointed out, the bulk (80%) of the spam are sent by compromised cable/DSL machines. In other words, even if you can find the IP the email is originated from, it offers no solution to you.
The "70%" figure mentioned earlir on refers to the percentage of url embedded in the spam (e.g. the store for the V1a4Ga) that uses an IP from China... If you manage to instruct your spam filter to read inside the email main body, you may have a solution.
On the other hand, I don't think it will be a long lasting solution.... If spammers can send spam thru compromised machine, they should be able to web host their site thru a compromised machine...
People want an open public form of communication, but are unwilling to accept email from people they don't want to hear. I think its interesting that people expect others (i.e. government) to go after these individuals in the hopes that it will put an end to all unwanted email (especially when the individuals are in other countries). If you sat down in the middle of times square, do you think its fair to expect people to stop yelling, the cars to stop honking, cellphones to stop beeping, or the people to stop shuffling past you? The truth is, you will always get unwanted email if you aren't going to actively manage what email gets to you. Do you ever get SPAM from IM? No. The reason why is because you have actually personally networked who you want to talk to and eliminated all others. I believe the future of email communication will be based around a networked process of individual/group permissions. Till that day, people are going to be lazy, unhappy, and wishing for something impossible -- that SPAM will end if they do nothing.
I filter based on those.
.mail domain is just dense and turns e-mail into a commodity controlled by big business instead of what is basically seen as something for everyone.
Current List of Domains
At the time of this posting it's at 2209 domains. In a day or so it should go up several dozen when I do an update.
It's the only thing in a spam that can't be obfuscated or it simply won't work. At best they can do one to one character codes. Occasionally a spammer will try to be clever and request the user copy and paste the link into their browser. I tend to catch those when I examine what got through but the pay off from those is probably so low that the spammer goes back to links. It's hard enough to get someone to click.
The other advantages of blocking based on click-me domains is that the header is irrelavent (it doesn't matter where it came from) and that it's the only thing that costs the spammer real money. And it's the only thing guarenteed not to be in a legitimate e-mail ever.
I've gotten several occuraces of dictionary words inbetween the same obvious spam domain entry. It's quite simple to see which are the filler to fool fully automated anti-spam systems and which are the real links.
The long and shot of it is that if you can use it, so can spammers. Charging thousands for a
You have to deal with spam within the rules that spammers set. You can't invent rules and then pretend spammers are going to follow them. After an update it takes a few days for the spam to pick up again. If major players would stop worrying about where spam was coming from and start dealing with where it's pointing to, this problem would be a lot more managable.
I've started sending my hotmail spam off to my mail server to help build the filter. It'd be nice if other people were building reliable lists so that I could premptively filter more domains. Nobody really takes it seriously though. They'd rather blacklist countries since it's "easy."
Ben
Work Safe Porn
You /.ers keep on spinning headlines about how some foreigners from country X are the biggest spammers, yet:
"70 percent of spam is sent from China by American spam outfits"
The same scheme over and over again! Stick your homophobia somewhere and keep to the facts. Unless the US cleans up its act wrt to spam nobody will get a significant relief from spam.
Grumble,
*t
This is simply presenting more of the story. SPAM is an international enterprise. Most of the instigators are here in the US, as are most of the compramised computers. However it sounds like from this and other articles is that much of the hacking work is being done by criminal syndicates (huge shock there) and that most of the websites the spammers are setting up are in China.
/., if you bothered to read it.
This does NOT mean that the domestic spammers are being ignored. One has already been convicted, Microsoft and Time Warner are suing a bunch more, and the justice department says it is prepping 50 criminal cases under teh new SPAM law. This was all announced on
Quit with the anti-American bullshit. Yep, the problem is here. We know, we finally have a law for it, though not as strong as we'd like, and the wheels are in motion. Doesn't mean that the US is solely responsible. I do not at all think it is unreasonable that Chinese hosts should show the same standards demanded of US hosts in not hosting SPAM sites.
But people are banning entire countries, not ISPs. That leaves those who live there no reason to choose a "good" ISP over a spam haven; all are discriminated against. If you're going to be punished for living in the same country as spammers you might a well get the benefit from using a service subsidised by them.
Firstly, thanks for the info. Helps a lot. Also gives me a few ideas. (Though probably not anything that hasn't already been considered before)
Maybe the next round of SMTP RFCs should require at require at least something to be given in the HELO/EHLO command. Depending on how strict the RFC requirements were you could then easily block on the criteria you supplied above.
Certainly if you reject at the level of RFC requirements then any corporation or individual complaining that their legitimate mail got rejected can then be told that their server breaks the published standards. (Yes, I know that RFCs are more suggestions than had requirements, but they are the closest we have to de facto standards for the various protocols)
Also if it was part of the RFC, then there would be more pressure for software-houses and ISPs to have the Windows-based servers set up to respond properly.
What would help (and would be nice) was if ISPs would allows RDNS records for those that request them for no extra charge. So then you could easily reject on the fourth (or fifth) item in the list. Especially if it was opt-in only, then anyone sending directly from their machine legitimate would have a valid RDNS entry.
People sending directly from machines without RDNS entries are more likely to be either compromised boxes or people trying not to get caught. And if it was free to get your IP address an RDNS entry from your ISP then it would reduce the legitimate reasons for people not wanting to get one.
It wouldn't catch everything, but it'd at least make it harder to send anything unofficially. And provide a way of directly identifying any server that sent you stuff you didn't want.
TiggsTiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
banning entire countries has become a last resort. some countries have a rather cavalier attitude toward abuse, like china. the chinese state operated national networks had an official autoresponder which responded to _all_ abuse complaints with the lie:
"In your SPAM eMail,I can't find the IP or the IP is not by my control.Please give me the correct IP.Thank you."
it's no wonder china is one of the most regularly firewalled networks. besides them being a spam haven, their _official policy_ regarding abuse is to do nothing at all, and lie about it!
so really, in china there really aren't any "good networks". they are _all_ bad.
as for banning korea etc. well, i have absolutely zero reason to receive email from anyone in korea nor do i read korean. so into the bin goes *.kr. how exactly does that hurt any koreans?
answer: it doesn't.
Why are we not punishing the fools who hire these spamming bastages to promote their business?
After all if the source of the spammers income dwindles then they wither. Perhaps I'm being overly simplistic.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
I know I'm repeating myself, but, we have to make sure that headline appears in the "mainstream" media, not just in places that only us geeks look.
Joe 6 pack needs to be routinely reminded that "spammers=criminals", and "buying from spammers=giving money to the Russian Maffia".
I think those of us who are familliar with the problem, need to take the initiative to contact our local media and help them understand what's going on. Lay it out for them: virusses -> zombie PCs -> mail relays -> spam -> criminal gangs.
And then repeat to make sure they get it: "Aunt matilda's computer is being used to make Big Money for the russian maffia.", and "buying from spammers finances the creation of more virusses".
The fewer people who buy from spammers, the less spammers can afford to stay in business. Shout it from the rooftops.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
ISPs are a major part of the problem. They either know, or can know, that they have spammers and other criminals on board. Yet many do nothing about this because they would rather have the money spammers pay them. We need to stop peering with bad ISPs in every way we can.
Those who whine about their mail not getting through because they are using one of these bad ISPs are also part of the problem. They need to stop encouraging their ISP to continue, and force the ISP to decide between good and evil. If there's another ISP, switch. If there's only one and it's because the government gives them a monopoly, then the government is the problem and they need to fix that. If there's only one and it's not a monopoly, then they need to start their own ISP (and not allow spammers, lest they also be cast into the deep pink cyber oblivion).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Wasn't sure about the spelling and didn't bother to look it up. Thanks. This is, after all, the place where spelling does indeed matter and is always perfect. (not to mention that English isn't my mother tongue, voimme jatkaa tätä keskustelua suomeksikin jos tuntuu paremmalta :P)
Spam is an inevitable by product of having a virtually free message delivery system.
As far as I can tell, this is the first time in the history of the world that a company, legit or not, could advertise their products and services for free. Every other method costs a hell of a lot more money and doesn't reach nearly the same audience. Be it paid tv advertising, direct mail, etc.
As long as email is free to send, boxes will always be full of spam. Spam will be the end of email, the problem is only getting worse, with no real hope in sight.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Why is the article titled "China and Russia 'behind current spam deluge' when they are just the ISPs? It's Americans paying for it, so they are behind it.
..." you just have to have it)
Of course, the lack of respect for US spam policy does not help the situation - but this is not surprising, given that the unstated rule of almost all American policy is "If you have enough money you can get away with whatever you like". (Note that this isn't "If you give me enough
Selling junk to idiots, America's number one industry.