China and its Relation With Spam

smooth wombat writes "Asia Times has a nice article about why China is becoming the spam capital of the world. Steve Linford, of Spamhaus fame, is quoted several times in the article and offers some insight into how the Chinese ISPs operate. Steves quote at the end of the article pretty much sums up why China isn't doing anything to curb the hosting of spam website servers in the country: "They simply don't want to know - China Telecom doesn't care because they're government-owned and there is no pressure coming from the government. Meanwhile, our statistics on spam volumes and the number of spammers setting up in China are going up and up and up.""

Comments

Here you go

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.okean.com/asianspamblocks.html - Detailed blocks so you get fewer innocents.

Link for China net blocks (and Korea, too)

[gammygator]

http://www.okean.com/thegoods.html

I thought someone might find the link useful.

Re:Solution? Bounce with the 550 power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to share your scripts and setup with us?

Thanks in advance.

chinese spam? what chinese spam?

[Indy1]

I stop noticing Asia being a spam problem after this sucker got put into use.

http://mail.btfh.net/asia-spam.txt/

You misunderstand.

[pavon]

The spam is not comming from china - china is simply hosting the spammer's websites. Here is the spam ecology:

American spammers pay Russian crackers to write viruses. These viruses infect Windows machines across the world. The spammers use the zombie machines to send spam which link to websites hosted in China. This has been the prototypical arrangement for many years.

Re:Solution? Bounce with the 550 power.

[andfarm]

For what it's worth, the Chinese government treats Falun Dafa / Falun Gong the same way you'd expect to treat a militant group.

Re:Solution? Bounce with the 550 power.

[taustin]

If spam is coming from their machine (and it is, in the scenario above), they are not innocent. They are either willfully participating, or so fucking stupid they shouldn't be allowed to breed.

Re:Solution? Bounce with the 550 power.

[bani]

554 is more powerful than 550:

554 5.7.1 thank you for your support of falun gong/free tibet now/free and democratic china.

I find the three pronged approach more satisfying. I might go for the four pronged approach and throw in taiwan eventually :)

Re:RBL

[hackstraw]

uridnsbl URIBL_CNKR cn-kr.blackholes.us TXT
body URIBL_CNKR eval:check_uridnsbl('URIBL_CNKR')
describe URIBL_CNKR Contains a URL listed in China/Korea
tflags URIBL_CNKR net
score URIBL_CNKR 2.5

For SA 3.x.

Re:Why is this still an issue?

[flynn_nrg]

I take you don't contribute to any large open source project then. For example, FreeBSD has several committers from Taiwan, China and other asian countries. It has developers from all over the world. By banning netblocks you're reducing the chance of ever getting in contact with people from those countries. Why?

Just today I've tried to answer a question on the freebsd-questions mailing list and the recipient's SMTP server has rejected my message because they use a stupid non-working dnsbl system that thinks my IP is dynamic.

I find it funny that this article talks about China, 90+% of the spam I get comes from residential DSL and Cable computers from... yes, USA. It's compromised Windows boxes that do the job these days, and there are thousands of them everywhere, not just in China and Korea.

Re:Why is this still an issue?

[1u3hr]

Evil Corporations who choose to be bad citizens and pollute and act unethically should be boycotted and should not recieve patronage, but when someone proposes doing the same to a government which is being a bad Internet citizen, they are attacked.

But you're NOT doing it to the Chinese government, but to ordinary people like me, who live in Hong Kong, thousands of miles away from the ISPs in Beijing and Henan, to which I have no relation or control. Go picket the Chinese embassy if you want them to pay attention. Kicking me around does nothing to stop spam. Go to FLorida and stop the cunts who actually origiante the spam (95% of the pam I get is from America).

Re:Why is this still an issue?

[h0tblack]

And according to http://www.spamhaus.org/ which the top source of spam, above China, is still the US.
China may be the biggest in terms of the market for zombie-pc network lists and does have a huge growing market for hosting spammers sites, but whose paying for these services? Most of the spam is still from a few westerners (url:http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/) most of whom are American's.