Spam's U.S. Roots

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Posted by michael on Friday August 13, 2004 @02:22AM from the part-of-the-problem-not-part-of-the-solution dept.

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."

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Are any of us suprised? by TaintedPastry · 2004-08-13 02:25 · Score: 5, Interesting

While I do get the few 'nigerian national' emails, most of them seem to be in pretty g00d 3ngli$h.
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.
What are those? by Quixote · 2004-08-13 02:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

a very limited set of IPs with high-bandwidth connections is dishing out the bulk of the spam,
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???
cybersmtp.com by samsmithnz · 2004-08-13 02:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
Re:I need your help by gptelemann · 2004-08-13 02:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

while [ true ] ; do wget http://www.emailsupply.net/lists.php -O /dev/null ; done

Try this also: large file, and hit the PHP, not a static page!
Well, it's an uncomfortable topic... by Theatetus · 2004-08-13 03:11 · Score: 3, Interesting
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
- manage spam filters and mitigate spam & virus damage for our POP clients
- audit our mailing list clients to make sure they're not actually spamming
- maintain our sendmail and bind clusters to prevent their use by spammers
- etc. etc. etc.
Would anybody else be out of a job if it weren't for spam?
--
All's true that is mistrusted
Re:Crush by The+Ultimate+Fartkno · 2004-08-13 03:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

Crush those sites? A sound idea. Start here. It's a Spam Vampire site set up by one of the more vicious anti-spammers I've ever seen in action. Non-caching, image-reaping, website-burning, bandwith-sucking action, all with a scorecard and a throttle. Now if we can just get this modded up so that a few thousand people are all playing at the same time...
Re:I need your help by Kallahar · 2004-08-13 03:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

It appears that his host is onlinehome-server.com which has a price list at here which shows their max monthly bandwidth as being between 25 and 100 gigs. At 90k/s bandwidth (their end) that's 324 megs/hour/person, so assuming 10 people do it it would take 30 hours each to hit their cap. 100 people could do it in 3.

Sounds like fun :)