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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.
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.
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...
why moderate the above comment down? Makes no sense
With all due respect, it would make sense to you if you had sense.
We have a ton of spam laws already. Passing more laws doesn't change a damn thing. Almost all spammers are already breaking numerous laws, criminal felonies involving computer tampering are just the start. In fact, the USA Patriot act could even be employed to consider the activities of most spammers to be terrorism and thus subject spammers to capital punishment. What more do you need? The problem isn't more laws. The problem is.... say it with me.....
E N F O R C E M E N T
Our law enforcement branches are more interested in going after people downloading Metallica or Martha Stewart's stock dealings than they are enforcing the plethora of violations done by spammers. Passing more laws has not proved effective.
PS "cirminal": Jesus, Timothy, you're actually paid to edit this?
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.
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.