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Spam's U.S. Roots
ahab_2001 writes "Notwithstanding how tired my finger is getting from deleting all of those unsolicited messages from China and Korea, Information Week reports that a study of filtered messages by the spam-blocking firm CipherTrust revealed that some 86% of spam originates in the U.S. Apparently, a very limited set of IPs with high-bandwidth connections is dishing out the bulk of the spam, according to this study."
Oh wait, that's not a good thing in this case.
a very limited set of IPs with high-bandwidth connections is dishing out the bulk of the spam
Crush those sites. Turn them off. Then repeat the study.
We should treat spam like a disease... and perform meaningful research on it.
Davak
Great, give me a list and I'll block them on my mail server.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
What do I do find morally distrubing is that there are geeks out there making assloads of cash providing a conduit for this spam with high powered servers and keeping the senders essentially nameless.
a cursory scan of spambot reporting shows this is crap sampling
I'd like to say I'm proud, but so far we make spam and ugly cars.
Unfortunately the Chinese aren't the only ones interesting in making a quick buck from this, or so you'd think from the vast lack of any kind of serious response from our legislators. But then again the Government is quite fond of their own kind of spam where they're pushing themselves as the "product". Quite fitting that Bush and co. are much the same as fake penis enhancing products to be honest.
Why doesn't spam come under the same scrutiny and attempts to shut it down as P2P?
If it is mostly as centralized as this study indicates, it should be easy.
OK, I know the answer (nobody's precious "IP" is threatened by spam), but if there are going to be attempts to regulate the Internet, it seems like this is a far more productive place to start.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I skimmed the article, but couldn't find the answer to the question that, I'm sure, is on most /.ers minds: what are those IPS???
I thought the spam problem has been resolved
Funny. My finger's not tired, I use SpamBayes. Sure, I miss out on great messages touting... "A great opportunity... New and spreading via the Internet in a very big way-It's FREE to join, and it promises a lot. Too good to be true?" ...but it makes it easier.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
We should start sending out "fake" spam with encoded music/movies in it. RIAA and MPAA would buy some new laws to stop spam.
What happens if/when the kingpins are taken down? Will the commercial anti-spam-solution market dry up?
Who's willing to bet that companies with spam-dependant business models won't want that happening?
(/tinfoil hat)
Has anyone ever thought of comparing the originating IP of an email against a blacklist? I'm not talking about the server that sent the message to the recipeint. I'm thinking of further along the relaying chain.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
What CipherTrust REALLY means is 86% of their potential clients reside in the US.
That's ok. Eventually spam will be outsourced. And we will all live happily ever after.
Everyone blames the chinese, but the ads are written in english, for american products, and targetted at americans. The Chinese are just a relay, and being blamed as spammers, when they should be blamed for not keeping their computers secure.
And I suppose that the sanctions on software, language barrier, and lack of skilled people have nothing to do with it?
What is the problem with them just giving us the list of IP blocks?? This is ridiculus. Are they trying to protect the internet identities of the spammers??? Come on!!
So I can take .cn out of my filter and replace it with .com and all my troubles will be over? Oh, wait...
Virtually serving coffee
Yes, well, excess is a part of the American lifestyle.
[Please sign here]
If these IP addresses being used exclusively to pump out spam, then if/when the list is released, black list them.
Report it to your ISP so they black list them on the mail servers. You would of course need to supply them the list via a 3rd party website site with a respectable reputation. (I.E. the researcher's site) Any ISP worth its salt isn't going to black list a bunch of IPs just because John Q. User says they should.
I have been using gmail since early July and the spam filter is the best I've used so far. I get very few spam in my inbox everyday and I haven't had a false positive in so long that I don't check anymore.
The spammers will continue to spam until they are ingored to the point that there is no money in it. But, you know, I just don't see that happening.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Proxy Server.
According to this, notorious spammer Scott Richter has his own netblock (69.6.0.0-69.6.79.255), which until recently was connected to the internet through Taiwan based ISP Chunghwa Telecom. After they gave up on him, Germany based T-Systems took over. If you have any problems with spam from this netblock, their security team would like to hear about it. They have announced that they will terminate the contract if Richter violates it.
Great, give me a list and I'll block them on my mail server. ...give us the list and let's block the whole freakin' netblocks at the router.
You are judged by the company you keep!
I'm looking for suggestions on what to do next. In the meantime, whatever you do, do not run this command:
That's a 4MB sample of the lists the gentleman has for sale, and surely the Slashdot effect runs the risk of using up all his bandwidth. Don't do it, I beg you!Carousel is a lie!
According to the article, Asia has a significantly higher number of spamming machines. It's just that the US, with readily available high bandwidth connections (and nutbars like Alan Ralsky) spews out a disproportionate percentage of all actual spam messages.
English isn't my first language, so i was looking at the topic for some time and this is what i thought it means:
- Spam is United State Roots
- Spam his United State Roots
- Spam has United State Roots
While only the last one makes sense, i still don't understand it. Doesn't 'roots' imply the first spam ever sent originated in the US? Didn't we already knew this for about 25 years? Wasn't DEC the first to send spam (to ARPANET)?
Maybe i understand things completely wrong here. Please feel free to correct me.
To purify our people, they should be eliminated.
Perhaps spammers would be less willing to spam if they realized they could be executed.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Give us the CIDR blocks of the whole ISP that the spammer is using. Block all packets from those ISPs. Once ISPs learn that they get blocked for tolerating spam, they will try harder to prevent them.
Get your own free personal location tracker
There will probably always be spammers, but the reason it is at all profitable is because of people like Orlando Soto, who just love reading spam and buying great awesome products like 'The only solution to Penis Enlargement.'
I cannot imagine why people like him love to buy product advertised by spam, but if spammers get even a 1% response rate from 1,000,000 emails in a month, thats 10,000 sales.
Filter away all you want, but you will be hacking at the branches rather than the root (sorry forthe obvious pun)
clicky
During my 10 years on the internet I have only recieved non-english spam once. I think this is because it just wouldnt be cost-effective sending spam in Swedish, my mother tounge with only 9 million speakers, because only a small fraction of the recepients will actually buy something, and this fraction would be too small if the target population was Swedish.
I could have told you this just by looking at the time when the spam starts rolling in - the start day in the U.S. east coast.
I'm in GMT+2 zone, all day is quiet, until around late afternoon when the U.S. day starts. Then all the spam starts rolling in. Same goes for virus mails.
sigaar
It's a possesive like Jim's Car.
It is niether Jim is Car, or Jim has car
It could just as easily be refering to Jim's US Roots.
Given how much the previous guy gets blamed by the current group, and how abso-fucking-lutely no one of the current group takes responsiblity for any goddamn thing [1], why not?
[1] I suppose if things weren't racing down the toilet (to mix metaphors), they just might. But that is another point......
I thought the title read "Spam has United States Robots".
Are the machines trying to overthrow the humans by burdening them with useless information?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I could have sworn I just saw a slashdot article stating that 80% of all spam came from some country like Elbonia or something. does anyone else remember that? Maybe someone with the skills to find it?
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
Something else the world can blame on Americans. So now we are all fat, lazy, arrogant, war wongering spammers!
F'eh
i know what this study is saying and it makes sense to me.
what i think is happening is that certain spammers who have access to asian servers are targetting my accounts and i got undetected by the bulk of other spammers.
perhaps my spammer doesn't want to relinquish or share his list with anyone.
and if that's true...i hope he doesn't start thinking about selling or leasing it.
Is it 5:30 yet?
This is the worst article and reporting. Not a single bit of factual data about the study. NOT ONE US ISP LISTED IN THE ARTICLE? WTF! If you are going to make big accusations, list the ISP's that and a break down of where you got the spam from.
Looooosers wrote this dumb article. I'd say infoweek is responsible for 80% of the slashdot spam today.
--jcarr
Given the relative popularity of Windows here. According to The Register 80% of spam also comes from infected Windows PCs!
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
Just yesterday I received spam from this guy at cybersmtp.com, advertising they can send bulk emails out. Check this out, I was surprised at the number of emails they have in their database, and the relative cheapness to send out nearly 300 million emails:
No Software to Buy - Nothing to download
Lowest cost for broadcast
E-Mail is a key component in maintaining contact with your customers
Email Broadcasting
Please choose from the following:
[ ] 1,000,000 e~mail sent $400
[ ] 5,000,000 e~mail sent $1,500
[ ] 10,000,000 e~mail sent $2,000.00
[ ] 56-70,000,000 e~mail sent $2,500.00
[ ] 224-280,000,000 e~mail sent $10,000.00
We use our own directory, so you do not need to pay one dime extra.
A study by the National Weather Service just found out sky is blue, most of the time.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Yes, I can. Clinton was on the Daily Show last Monday and he said that it was a secret DNC plot to take over the GOP since they can't resist the enhancement and porno ads.
Now we can stop all the fingerpointing at foreign nations to blame those nefarious Asians, or the socialist Europeans, or the terrorist Arabs for our spam. We can honestly stop deluding ourselves and look at the problem and say,"It really is nothing more than American business alive and well." However, I find that the analyses are always going to be flawed. If the spam passes through even one illegitimate relay along the way it's pretty safe to assume that the relay has been doctored to rewrite connections. The latest spate of spam that I've received has seemingly come from IP addresses registered to Edward's Air Force Base and the USPS. Of course, the SMTPd signatures openly acknowledge that they're "misconfigured".
Really, until a proactive approach is taken to seriously investigate the businesses whose products are being advertised then tracking spam from the mail side is an exercise in self-delusion.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
CipherTrust has a breakdown of by country stats by message volume and IPs on their webpage
I am wondering 3 things
1. Do people actually trust their spam filters enough to delete the spam that is caught?
2. Aren't spam filters getting very good. The main spam filter that I use is the one that hotmail has. I have gotten 1 spam message for like 4 days and the rest of the time it has caughten every single one. As for false positives. There has been two instances of this but nothing a phone call to me couldn't handle.
3. SPAM is still an issue in this day an age because people are gullable enough to fall for it. It makes money. SPAM filters, black listing IPs, making laws against it are all ways to help but if you want a cure, a cure that will work the best, you have to focus on the user. Encourage users to become informed users. By the way I think this will solve our virus and adware program problem too. Why don't we cure the root of the problem instead of the symptoms?
Nuttles
Christian and proud of it
The article mentions zombie computers, computers hijacked by backdoor trojans and the like, but the research group seems to not diferentiate between the act of using hijacked services and spam in general.
Had they done so, they might have noted where a lot of hijacking originates: Europe and Asia. How much spam is generated by hijacked computers and how much is generated by people using their own legitimate resources?
For instance, you're shooting dice if you try connecting to any url that ends in cz (as just one example). These idiots are even seeding bogus keyword hits so some dupe will click their url. You'll end up with a lot of malware and other nasties coming up the wire trying to infect your machine. Hilighting where SPAM originates but paying bare lip service to the causal attributes of the problem doesn't leave me impressed.
Perhaps it's because America bashing is more fun than impartial, thorough, research?
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
A lot of us in the IT world owe our jobs in some way to spam: the company I work for wouldn't need a 4-person server staff if we didn't have to
Would anybody else be out of a job if it weren't for spam?
All's true that is mistrusted
Or equivalent, depending on what mailer you use.
Being a US-based company that deals with only US-based clients, I took it upon myself to reject all "foreign" mail with a URL for them to check out when it bounces. Such as:
jp 550 REJECTED - see http://blah.com/spam.txt
If it's legitimate and the person reads the included URL, it tells them how to contact me to get them whitelisted. Since I started blocking all non-US countries, I've blocked hundreds of thousands of foreign mail. And that URL has been viewed only once, with no action taken on their behalf.
I issue standard bounce messages with detailed instructions for them. Since 99.9999% of it is spam, I have no problems with taking such extreme measures. I have received zero complaints.
The only time I was asked about this was when the president informed me that a current client is setting up shop in France, and asked me to "unblock" their mail. I asked him to ask them what the domain would be (blah.fr) and allowed mail from them.
Before I was my company's email admin, the previous guy took zero steps to prevent spam. Now I bounce or reject over 75,000 a month, including automatically forwarding spamtrap spams to spam@uce.gov.
If you don't take steps to prevent it, what right do you have to bitch about it?
This is fairly old, but in case anyone hasn't seen it, here are some accounts of people trolling Nigerian spammers. http://sweetchillisauce.com/nigeria.html This one is probably my favorite: http://sweetchillisauce.com/ntales/CK2-1.html.
Spam won't stop until SpamAssassin becomes SpammerAssassin.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
I hate the IT design
could anybody tell me the IP range of the ISP's in question (that dont host any important mail servers) as i dont know any americans, and i'd like to block the range, as a trial at first, if i dont recieve any decent mail in my junk folder, i'l keep it (the filter on the IP range)
1. Confuse users with USR
2. Spam users while pretending to be USR
3. ???
4. Profit!
Ok, so now what do you think the average layperson in Europe (or anywhere for that matter) is going to think, when you tell them the usual Slashdot party line that most of the spam comes from Asia, and those damn Korean a) can't lock up their servers b) can't be bothered to target their victims effectively and stick to people speaking their language ?
That's right, they'll tell you that very obviously 99% of all spam is from the US. No one you'd ask would ever question that for a nanosecond.
Not because of the English language (that could be UK, Australia, whatever...), but simply because issues such as mortgages/debt consolidation, shopping around for drugs, doctors, dentists, or a degree, even being fond of sports, is something incredibly alien to most of Europeans. I won't insult your intelligence explaining why...
Unfortunately, you can't imagine how bad all this makes America look in the eyes of the layperson/mummy/granny/average joe in front of their AOL/Wanadoo/Hotmail/whatever email.
For most, this is the only direct contact they get from across the atlantic, and it's from a bunch of annoying salespeople that expect the reader to be impotent, in incredible debt, or so gullible as to fall for a nigerian scam.
Draw your own conclusions as to how this affects someone's perception of a country and its culture... Granted this may be a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it's still a daily annoyance coming from the US, and the dumbest people won't look further to make up their mind about americans.
Which is a pity, but must not be underestimated.
A coworker was talking about webpages that contain a collection of large images from spammers websites. Although the basic idea is the same as the "while...wget" in Saint Aardvark's post, it's apparently quite legal since the spammers had been aggressively inviting the public to view these images. Does anyone know anything more about this?
7) PROFIT!!!
Sorry, I had to.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
...that spammers have more bandwidth than God? Tomorrow this guy is gonna see a blip on the radar and say, "Ooh, look, I got more traffic!"
90% of the spam originates from America, all this company are doing is regurgitating Spamhaus's stats
SpamHaus Register Of Known Spam Operations
nice to see action being taken....NOT
I find it interesting.
just ban all US email...
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Dear Mr. Soto,
Congratulations, Mr. Soto. I am writing you today to inform you that I have been authorized to grant you a ****LIFETIME SUPPLY**** of cyanide tablets ****ABSOLUTELY FREE****!!!!!!! That's right. FREE!!!!! No strings attached. We don't need your credit card number. (Enough people already have that.) We have your address and the pills are already in the mail.
Sincerely,
The Internet
Spam is more like a nuisance crime than a disease. Diseases are natural occurrences, unpleasant yes but a biological function. Spam is a deliberate attempt to pollute a public space for private gain.
In a sense it's the fault of the original e-mail/internet designers. By creating a nearly free and unlimited communications channel for themselves, they never anticipated that the channel would be hijacked by advertisers who are claiming the internet for their own private personal gain (as a open medium through which they can sell nearly unlimited access to advertising agencies).
By hijacking it is. Spammers are stealing a public resource.
A situation like this occured about 80 years ago when radio was becoming popular as a medium. Advertisers set up stations and broadcast ads and chatter over each other's frequencies. Eventually in the early 1930's, the US Federal Communications Commission (and similar agencies in other countries) was formed and clamped down harshly on unregulated broadcasting. That solved the problem of overlapping stations but eventually led to the situation that we have today of stagnant and insipid radio.
Spamming is also like grafitti, which is a nuisance crime of a person painting a private message in a public space that is too low in value to be protected against defacing by a full-time guard. The public space gets trashed by messages considered ugly to all except the miscreant. Other countries punish this activity harshly and they don't have defaced public spaces.
Spam will continue until the techno community creates enforceable guidelines to deal with this problem, and then actually enforces them. This could be banning sending messages beyond a certain number or actually selling licenses to spammers to allowing them them to send X million e-mails per month. The only actual realistic solution to spam is to stop allowing unlimited private use of a public communications medium.
Don't rely on governments to address this problem. Spam will be solved by the open source community coming up with a definition of spam, justification of restriction, and effective cessation of spamming activities when the spammers refuse to follow published guidelines enacted by the open source community. In fact, it's likely that the spammers will use the police against the open-source community's spam-limiting activities.
In other words, spam will lighten when the open-source community uses their technology and skills to shut the spammers down, regardless of whether or not the spammers have legal authority to flood the internet with millions of unwanted messages.
n/t
http://spam.weblogsinc.com/entry/4463682046968893/
Link goes to quote, plus more links backing up this data....
"A study released this week by Commtouch reveals that about 55% of all spam originates in the United States, and that more than 73% of spam refers to websites which are hosted in China.
Ninety-nine percent of all websites mentioned in spam sample analyzed by Commtouch were hosted in China, South Korea, the United States, Russia, or Brazil"
Here is another link, with a more detailed article.
http://www.securitypipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml? articleId=22103058
TruePunk | Games
Starting today, you can electronically submit your comments and suggestions to the Federal Trade Commission about the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 ("CAN-SPAM Act"). All comments are due 9/13, so if you actually want to make a difference, now is your chance.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
They are right in my spam folder. I think I had one false negative since I've began running it a couple of months ago.
ISPs pass on the cost of receiving spam (bandwidth and additional mail servers), storing spam (RAID arrays), and transmitting the spam to customers when they pick up their e-mail. Spam filtering software which works at the client end might save you some time in dealing with the spam, but the spam has already cost you money by the time it gets to your filtering software.
I would name names... But I would be afraid he would change IP's and my block would be no good anymore.
Check your snort/web logs for FormMail probes.
Spamhaus published ROKSO list has always shown that most top spammers are U.S.-based.
All it takes is more vigorous law enforcement. Where are the prosecutors, when we really need them?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
And we just spent 2 years convering all of our Java to Cobol. Sheesh!
Catch those chinese and korean spam before they make it to your smtp:
This geoip firewall filter for iptables drop mail coming from incriminated countries.
This tool gets 50% of the spam I should receive. Combined with dspam, I do not receive anything but genuine mails.
Enjoy !
Great... 86% of blocked spam comes from the US.
Tmajority of spam that actually makes it into my account, however, is originating from US advertisers using Russian and Chinese spam companies.
Why doesn't spam come under the same scrutiny and attempts to shut it
down as P2P?
Spam is a money maker, and not just for the guys pitching the penis pills. It makes money for ISPs, who charge "high-risk" rates for being associated with it, it makes money for list brokers and other putatively legitimate businesses who sell out your email address to list brokers, it makes money for banks who sell CC services to spam merchants, and so on.
To fight spam, you have to stop thinking of it only in terms of people sending email, think of it holistically -- other people, with more influence on legislation and enforcement are also making money off it.
Spam is fully entrenched in the economy and won't be going away. The only way to make it *mostly* go away is for the FTC to get serious about deceptive marketing practices: have the FBI investigate the entire *world* of spam and treat it like an organized conspiracy. Some RICO indictments and convictions of people profiting off of spam (not just the pill seller and email sender) would make it damn hard to run a spam operation.
Until this happens, we'll see trailer trash guys running a string of zombies get nailed, but the big names turning big dollars won't get touched.
Why let in connections from these countries?
If you have business or contacts , maybe, otherwise
why bother?
Iptables on a firewall does a lot of good.
Put selective holes in if you need to, I even block some US ISPs that are bad on spam and probes.
I connect to the internet for my convienence not theirs.
I've got a cattle prod, a tube of KY, and a pretty good idea for a research experiment . . .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Funny, but for nearly a year, tons of Russian spam could be tracked in one way or the other to US sources...
But blame the US for it is rather, uuuuh, stupid...
In fact most spam, even "native" spam, can be tracked to very few sources. And here the US ain't alone. China, India, some networks in Western Europe and Russia can be put in the train. If you are eager to track spammers you going to be amazed that even in the US the big fat spam networks can be counted by the fingers of your hands.
However, media and even well-known spamhauses, love to point fingers to the "first-source" of spam. For us it can be europeans or americans. For americans it can be chinese or russians. But, if anyone takes the care to see a few of these spam sources, he will see a huge world of trojaned hosts, with auctions reminding the dirtiest slave trade, robots controling the sending of millions of e-mails, tons of traffic that some careless user will have to pay from his pocket.
Police hunts frequently the wrong people as they don't have a clue about the true picture of this industry. Victims can be whoever, example: young teens that just visited the fan-club of their hero (a true story btw). No porno, no crackers, no kiddiez trying to script around. Mostly innocent sites with TV stars, comics heros or that lovely band from MTV's clips... But "mostly" ends in a banner, a javascript statement or a well-crafted exploit. And soon someone knocks your door searching for those million letters spams.
Not long ago I said to some friends that we got back to slavery ages. With the only difference that one doesn't need to know his status...
Tracking the real sources among all the trash that goes on spam industry is very hard. But, sometimes, one has some luck and finds curious things. So, who are the real sources of this slavery trade? There are several, but the big money seems to hide behind a few intereestting figures. Who are they? Well, I believe that Michael Moore could make a second blockbuster if he picks them for the show... Naaaa it ain't Chimney and Bushman. Not even near... But not so far also...
Anyway I would be a lot harder for Moore to publicize such a new film... This time he would have to be smarter than a fox...
A year ago, most of my spam was from South Korea, in the Korean language, advertising South Korean products and services.
I get surprising little spam that is written in English.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Damn, no points when I need them...
I've already slapped them for a couple hundred MB this morning... getting a steady 19K/sec with the php file, 58K/sec for the text file...
When I 1st thought of the idea, I thought that I must be losing it. After thinking about it more, it began to make sense. Giving capital punishment to them is a self-defensive move, not just an emotional 1. We have to be protective of our time.
It makes perfect sense. I'm even open to vigilante justice, as long as they really are guilty.
testing out my trending skills
On,
A couple of occasions during Slashdot discussions of spam I've noted that I get very little spam on holidays such as New Years or the Fourth of July.
Personally I attributed it to spammers being in the United States rather than the purported "China". Hey, spammers gotta celebrate too ya know.
But, I was berated on Slashdot that I was loonie and I had no idea what I was talking about. So to all those out there who said I was full of it:
HA! I told you so.
Caution: Contents under pressure
My bad. Sorry guys.
Most spam I get is full of spaces in the middle of words or weird characters or insane grammar that I can't even figure out what they want me to buy. So not only do I have to read the garbled subject of the message and mark it as spam (because their crazy message evades my filters) I get to sit there confused as to what they were trying to tell me.
It's just bad marketing to leave the customer confused. Maybe I should just stop using email all together until someone has a better system.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Spam can be considered a DDoS attack. Your mailserver uses up bandwidth accepting all those messages.
Once they've been accepted, then SpamBayes can filter them. But the bandwidth has already been taken.
I've seen instances where legit email was defered because the receiving server used up all of its mail threads on incoming spam messages.
And it doesn't take too many zombie spam machines to start seriously impacting a business's T-1 line. Particularly if you run a few different domains on that that T-1.
"If people just stop buying stuff from the spam, the success rates will go down low enough that spam will no longer be effective and go away, right?"
/. had an article about mortgage spam a while back. The banks would buy "leads" from companies ... who had bought the "leads" from other companies ... who had bought the "leads" from spammers.
Actually, that is correct. The PROBLEM is that it costs almost NOTHING to send a million spam messages.
So ANY sales will be enough to justify the expense.
It's all statistics. A certain percentage of the population will buy this crap.
"That's why my answer is not to go after the spammers who are slime but often out of US jurisdiction, or even the ISPs because while some of them are evil & look the other way, a lot of them are trying, but it's hard work."
Actually, most of the spammers are in the US. Spamhaus even lists them.
"No don't bother with them, I think they should go after the companies selling the crap."
I agree with that for the most part.
But
Of course they were all SHOCKED that they were purchasing leads from spammers. And the spammers promptly were no long retained. So the spammers changed their name and the companies will happily buy leads from CompanyY which happens to have the same address and phone as the old CompanyX.
In that scenario, NOTHING will change until the banks stop paying for the leads. But the banks have arranged it so they have complete deniability.
"I guess it's kinda like going after the Johns instead of the prositutes."
I think that is exactly the point.
Spam servers are automated and do not require user intervention unless something fouls up. It's the only way to send out millions of spam. So, your theory isn't sound since the spammer can be out celebrating AND sending out spam without a problem.
We need to tag them with orange glow in the dark safety tags so people can share their love with them. Behold the Spam Hunter:
Here we see the Spammer in his native environment, lets pull his network connection and see if we can get him rialed up. Crikey, look at em dial tech support!
My modest proposal is that we have to make it legal for people and service providers to charge spammers for the traffic they create. If you can make a profit in hunting down spammers, I bet a lot of people would jump at the chance. A federal spam license requiring spammer to register, etc, pay huge taxes to the government, complete with cute little orange tag for the ear. So we know where they live, and allowing people to charge them for the hassle. did I mention that yet? People would get rich off this, hunting down illegal spammers, collecting fees for ISPs, etc. And
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
In Baltimore, the sky is usually Orange (at least at night). Blue skies were rare, and those gorgeous twilight blues almost unseen.
--LWM
Mafia Don Announces New Anti-Spam Venture
As the NSA and FBI fear, traditional crime organizations have been incorporating high-tech communication into their organizations. Although Janet Reno was quoted stating "This is law enforcement's worst nightmare.", techies around the world are sure to be pleased with one New York Syndicate's new venture.
It all started when Don Dominiqi signed onto his AOL account last Monday morning. His inbox was filled with "Make Money Fast", "Viagra On-Line", and "Teenybopper Web Sex" ads. Lost amidst the drivel was an important note detailing a non-taxed shipment of Marlboros, which were later confiscated by the BATF. Little did he know, as he shouted "Bring me the left hand of this f*cking gutterslime!" what would become of it all.
Later that same day, Billy "Run!" Brutekowski and Larry "My Eyes!" Plucker cornered the pasty-faced offender of the Family in a small cyber cafe in Greenwich Village. "This was by far the creepiest place the Boss has ever sent us." stated Billy, who only spoke on condition of anonymity. "Everyone in this place looked pale and sickly, like they had already been 'spoken to'. We asked for this punk, and several people quickly pointed him out. Most of the scum we find in gin joints aren't so quick to finger one of their own," Billy continued.
"He must not watch much TV, because this sh*t didn't even flinch when we came to the corner he was hiding in," Larry proceeded to relate. "We dropped this sheet of paper the Boss had given us on his table and he says 'So you guys want to make money fast, eh?' He puts out his and says to give him $20. This scrawny little dirtball tells me to give him $20!" Larry was quite agitated at this part in his story, and his description of how Sammy Spammer's hand fell off was quite garbled.
Billy continued, "Up till now, this was a routine visit. We was just being playful. The weird sh*t began when we tried to leave." "This pimply faced kid blocks the door as we try to leave, and I'm thinking to myself 'Great, a f*cking Karate Kid hero. He just stand there, and then he hands me a $5 bill." Billy pulls out the $5, and holds it like it is his first quarter from his favorite grandmother. "They lined up after that, and we had $175 in 'tips' when we left the joint."
Later that day the Don himself visited the caf, unwilling to believe the story. Although the details are unclear, sources at the caf indicate that the Don has hired them to build and host a new Anti-Spam site. Through a SSL transaction system, the site will accept spam complaints and credit card donations towards 'solutions to problems'. Multiple complaints against the same spammer are added to the total until an acceptable solution has been found.
Larry tells us that a typical $250 solution is a broken hand, and for $2000 all anyone ever sees again of 'the problem' are his shoes.
The URL is to be announced next week, and the cyber caf's phones have been jammed with requests for more information.
We may have to make allowances for inflation, but still ....
And maybe a few guys can help out getting segfault back online. It was a priceless resource in it's day - Segfault.org website today, and as seen on the Internet Archive
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/20/165 0255&tid=111
So which is it, 71% from China or 80% from the US? Or is it US outfits spamming from China?
If most the so called "King Pins" were nailed, and spam dropped by 90%, that 10% would be even more hotly contested and it would drive right back up again. When you get 100 emails and 95 are spam you glaze over the spam. But when you get 6 emails and 1 is spam, you notice it. And getting noticed is what spam is all about.
So pressure on the spammers isn't the answer. Some system that denies the ability to spam period is.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Start charging for messages like they do for cell phone minutes. Each account has a set limit of free time and then make it a per-message charge.
Each account level could have certain number of free messages per accounting period.
Rule #0: Spam is theft.
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.
YOUR freedom of speech ends, where MY freedom not to listen begins.
We ought to be able to find these people and hurt them...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What the heck is the KY for? ;-)
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I'm a fan of the spam that isn't even in english.
With attachments.
If you want to sell me something, shouldn't you use a language I understand?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
-- which no one (at least, who is smart enough to do this) uses any more.
This concept will never get off the ground until the site becomes Mozilla friendly.
Only 3 spams so far today as hurricane makes landfall in Fla. To compare, last Friday there were 48 by 12 noon. Let's hope the hurricane wipes Boca Raton and all those spammer bastards in the trailer park off the planet.
http://www.cf13.com/game-over-spammers.htm
will do just that.
Therefore:
SpamByte: Game Over, Spammers/Computer Crackers...
Bryan Taylor
iamcf13@hotpop.com
SpamByte code: 7
(see http://www.cf13.com/game-over-spammers.htm )
All email containing unwanted content will be summarily deleted or reported as spam.
If all ISPs would block port 25 for residential customers, that would channel the mail through their mail servers which they could monitor and disable users till they remove the menace, patch their box, get an AV program and a firewall running. Lie and get disabled for the same thing and on strike three enjoy dial-up. This would also help curtail virii with their own SMTP engines and prevent that deluge from being sent out. The business customers with their own mail servers would not be affected by this, and should have spamcop reports to show if they are spammers and again answer to disabled service till they explain themselves or fix their open relay. "What right would they have to do this!" you may ask, you are a menace to their network (Read the license agreement) and dragging that networks name through the mud if you are contributing to this.
Changing your current SMTP, say for MacMail, to your ISPs would not change the reply-to address that you setup and still allow you port 110 to POP for that email account. Several ISPs already do this and the amount of spam coming from that network drops so drastically they find themselves removed from Blacklists for their domain name. Computers are as much of a responsiblity to maintain as cars are, if not more given the global influence they can have.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
According to my analysis, only about 50% of spam is written in a Latin-derived
character set[1], and that includes all that Spanish spam from Central and
South America, all the money scams written in mostly ALL CAPS that are
generally believed to come from Africa, and anything that comes from Western
Europe or Australia (not much from there I think), and any spam written in
English coming from Asia, which is doubtless no small amount, in *addition*
to everything from the US.
*Most* of the other 50% is written in decidedly Asian character sets (though
there's a little Cyrillic spam and the occasional Greek message). As much as
25% of all spam is in the GB2312 character set alone. I have a really hard
time believing that's coming mostly from the US.
Maybe my sample is skewed (admittedly, I'm looking mostly at spam sent to
one address), but it's a pretty good-sized sample (1.3GB).
[1] For UTF-8 messages, I base my "character set" data on the actual
characters used, which in spam are usually ideographic or syllabic
characters from Asia; most English-language spam is written in ASCII
or Latin-1 or something similar. Most English-language UTF-8 messages
are from mailing lists related to the open-source community. I suppose
this is probably because US localized builds of Outlook and its ilk
don't send unicode by default.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I've had a number of problems with a Cogent Communications customer (Glowing Edge) spamming the hell out of one of my addresses. After numerous complaints to Cogent (and a couple of phone calls to their abuse dept.), I determined that they really don't plan to drop this customer (despite being told by their abuse dept. that this customer generated the greatest number of complaints). I've since denied all of their netblocks (see below) from sending mail to me - I recommend others do the same. Don't support ISPs which allow their customers to spam!
1 83.224.0/19. 0.0/16. 0/20
Cogent Communications netblocks:
209.115.0.0/16
209.41.192.0/18
206.
216.28.0.0/15
209.146.0.0/17
66.28
66.250.0.0/16
66.132.0.0/17
207.254.144
38.112.0.0/13
I think this has always been known to the spam community. The spammers are mostly based in the U.S., so yes, the spam originates from here. However, they route it through other servers... some are broadband and others are in Brazil, China, etc..
If the FBI arrested fifty spammers a year, we'd see a big drop in spam.
hundreds of thousands of trojans constantly usinf spammers' bandwidth would be much more effective in crushing spammers than a few "vampire sites".
Another thing that crossed my mind in the past thinking about open relays, and now about botnets of trojans relaying spam, is that once their addresses are known, perhaps a good way to reduce their capacity (thus lowering the amount of spam they send) is to send them dummy email for them to relay to each other...
I often look at the headers analysis produced by SpamCop before reporting spam, and very often I see spam that is sent (relayed) from US source (probably almost always infected PCs) with spamvertized websites in Korea or China. The Spam is of course English and intended for a North American audience.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE