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."

Comments

Crush

[Davak]

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

Re:Crush

[halowolf]

Well its obvious what the rest of the world should do! We should add the entire American IP address range to the great blacklist and move along! :)

Its not like other countries havn't been blockaded...

Re:Crush

[mattjb0010]

Meaningful infectious disease research needs to take into account people who do transmit the disease a lot. Besides which, most of the spam coming from China and Korea does originate in the US -- either relayed through trojan boxes or properly owned boxes, but definitely advertising US "products" in US English. Looking at the last known good header IP address doesn't tell you a lot about the true origin these days.

Re:Crush

[GreyPoopon]

But the rest of the world's economy would take a severe hit if they were cut of from America even in limited fashion like email.

Yes, most likely, but since the impact to the American economy would be similar, it's unlikely that the US would let that happen. Somebody ought to do a comparison analysis between the impact of loss of connectivity and the impact that fighting spam has right now. A few days of lost connectivity may very well be worth the cost savings to companies that have to spend money on dealing with spam.

Limited set of IP's?

[tpwch]

Great, give me a list and I'll block them on my mail server.

I'm confused

[pedestrian crossing]

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.

Re:I'm confused

[lunatik42]

Spam doesn't come under the same fire as P2P because it *promotes* consumerism and the "entertainment" industry, whereas file sharing circumvents the mass market etc. completely. Ergo, most of the war on spam is fought by the people - no one on top of the dogpile wants to regulate advertising. Besides, there are anti-spam filters being sold all over the place. That's another way to capitalize on the phenomenon.

It makes me wonder...

[Short Circuit]

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.

Nice Advertisement..

[inkdesign]

What CipherTrust REALLY means is 86% of their potential clients reside in the US.

SPAM thrives best where it is consumed.

[erick99]

I think that SPAM does so well (so to speak) here in the United States because enough people read SPAM and buy the products to make it worthwhile for the spammers to do business. I had no idea there was such a market for "male enhancement," "payday loans," and the other similar ads.

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

Re:SPAM thrives best where it is consumed.

[multimed]

That's just not true at all--a very common misconception. 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? Hooey. The people doing the spamming and the crap for sale or whatever are two different things. Spammers don't care what the response rates are, they sell the service of bulk emails. They get paid no matter what. Of course that's not what they tell the businesses buying their services. They pitch how cheap it is to reach millions of people and the whole "if just 1% buys something" fallacy. The problem is the greed of the businesses continues to let them believe the sales pitch of the spammers. That's why legitimate companies don't do spam--not because it's immoral or illegal but because it already doesn't make financial sense.

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. No don't bother with them, I think they should go after the companies selling the crap. There's a contact in most of the spam for people to actually buy the crap. And that's a hell of a lot easier than tracking the spammers, nail the businesses paying for the spam. I guess it's kinda like going after the Johns instead of the prositutes.

iptables -I FORWARD -s isp/20 -j DROP

[caluml]

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.