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U.S. World's Foremost Spam Nation In 2004
der Kopf writes "As reported by ZDNet, '42 percent of all spam sent this year came from the United States,' which makes the U.S. the unthreatened king of the 2004 spam hill. Number two on the list is South Korea (with 13.43%), while China can be found in third place (with 8.44%). The U.S. put out more spam this year than all the other countries in the top 12 combined." All depends who's counting, I guess.
We're good where it counts.
Do Not Eat iPod Shuffle
Finally, something to be proud of.
That one just isn't going to change. Never has, never will.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
All depends who's counting, I guess.
This study comes from the UK; given recent electoral history, I'm far more inclined to trust that they can count than I am to trust any study which comes out of the US.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
...with owned, unpatched Windows machines sitting directly on cable or DSL connections.
If Comcast and Verizon spent half as much on cracking down on their moron customers as they do on mailers begging me to use their Internet services, they'd have this problem under control in no time.
I am going to block USA, Korea and China on my firewall!
If most of the spam comes from the US, that means that any anti-spam legislation passed here could have a huge effect.
;-)
Of course, now we have to wait for Congress to actually do something about it.
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
The US is supposed to have a legal tool against spam, and yet it's the worst offender in the world.
I guess we CAN-SPAM and we're mighty proud of it...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So we hold the majority on manhood enhancement, hot free teens, and low low mortgage rates.
*sniff* I've never been so proud of my country.
The coolest voice ever.
If you'd ask me, 90% or more comes from the US, through relays all over the world...
100% of Spam comes from the USA! SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation based in Austin, Minnesota!
How did they come up with their numbers? I can easily see the US leading because of zombified Windows machines, but where are the ISP mail relays those zombies are using?
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
They must have gotten their inspiration from military spending.
Fucking spammers!
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This could explain South Korea's position near the top of the list, as it leads the world for broadband penetration.
Gee, poor guys, if someone threatened me of broadband penetration, I guess I'd send out unsolicited email too...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
These reports use records at arin/apnic/ripe/lanic to determine country of origin. Just because an ip was issued by ripe (for instance) doesn't mean it's being used in Europe.
In anticipation of yet another wave of proposed solutions, I have attached the standard spam-solution form for your convenience:
----------
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work.
Here is why it won't work:
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
My understanding is that if you could close down the spamvertised sites, spam would largely be restricted to phishing attacks. If I didn't believe this, I probably wouldn't bother using spamcop!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
as the center of the world's economy moves away from the US (which is is). Americans have way too high a Standard of Living. Worse, we've got a high SoL for most anybody here. The rich bastards of the world are busy ballancing the books and it looks like India and China (with their hugh, easily abusable populations) will come out ahead. Just give it time and the spammers won't have nearly enough Americans with more money than sense anymore, but they'll be plenty elsewhere.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I live in Austria (Europe) and all the spams I get at home and at work (over a hundred a day) are in English and address subjects relating to the US. All the mortgage spams refer to US mortgages, all the Viagra Spams refer to pharmacies that deliver to the USA, all prices are in dollars, and so on.
Most European countries have tough anti-spam laws. I get practically no spams that come from Europe or specifically target Europeans. The last Spam I got in German was from some dumbass dot-com newbie who had bought a CD-ROM full of "guaranteed legal e-mail addresses" from some US scammer.
The problem with spam is a problem with the USA.
Fix it.
Now.
Hormel is located in the United States.
In other words, the USA has more computers than China. Once China reaches a higher level of prosperity, with the same number of computer desktops possessed by the USA, then China will easily exceed the spam level generated by the USA.
Now an article with research backing it shows the US as the major culprit, and what does everyone do? Make excuses or jokes. What makes you think the Chinese don't have zombie machines? Or is it ok for the US to spam, but no one else?
And the fact of the matter is, aside from a few random Russian/Chinese emails (1 in 100), most of the spam I receive is offering goods and services in English, directed at the North American market. 'Where' the spam comes from doesn't really matter, what the spam is selling and where that thing is should.
...you're American? ;)
(Merry Christmas!)
- Jax
You've managed to put your finger on the biggest problem in the Western social and economic system, that corps have the same rights than humans but none of the responsibility .
Though I don't think hitting the corporations financially as punishment really works. Large corporations will typically build in potential losses from economic punishments for misdeeds into their business model. A company may knowingly release a product they know to be unsafe, and simply put a portion of their profits aside for paying out of court settlements to victims.
In essense, this is akin to saying that it's alright for me to go around killing people without fear of jail if I can afford to pay the victim's families a large portion of money.
What I'd like to see is criminal charges brought on descision makers in corporations who knowingly use unsafe methods to produce a product that they know to be dangerous. In other words, a manager who makes the decision to save $0.02 on each product produced by using a less safe part won't be hedging those cost savings against the potential court costs from the families his company's product kills, he'll be hedging it against the very real possibility that he himself may face prison time for multiple murder charges.
We cannot give large corporations exemption from responsibility on a human level. We see corporations as faceless entities, but there are always human beings behind the scenes making decisions on how that corporation acts. If we start making those humans accountable for the actions of the company for whom they make decisions, I think we'd start seeing quite a bit more safety, envrionmental and social responsibility in the corporate world.
The Internet is generally stupid
I block all email based on IP. If the IP is registered in APNIC, LACNIC, or RIPE, it goes to the SPAM bin. SPAM from U.S. and Canadian IP addresses goes to a different folder, then reported to FTC and originating ISP via SpamCop.
The ratio varies from 30/70 to 20/80, with the majority percentage coming from foreign (to the U.S.) IP addresses.
In other words, anecdotal evidence indicates most SPAM comes from countries *other* than the U.S.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
It isn't just the source of spam - 95% or so of the spam is very obviously targetted at americans, too.
Ok, porn sites are international, but mortgage refinancing and what else the other crap is seems totally US-centric to me.
I'm sure 95% of the idiots who buy from spammers can be found in the US, too.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yeah, most of the spam is also US centric. It mainly contains either Via9ra or P3ni5 enlargement programs. Most of the people out side US receive these mails and some stupid amongst those who really want to purchase those products by reading the mails can not buy since most of these products even don't have distribution network outside US.
One of my friends, who work for a US based company, which sells cigarretes online. All this guy has to do is get some working email ids and send the mail drafted by the US based company. He does this from location outside US though. This guy has written a UserAgent (Robot) which goes to Yahoo and grabs the email ids at random and mails them. Untill this it looks very bad but if you see inside they do get enough business through this channel for their survival at least. They do not have any other business channel other than this and they are doing fine.
Even if this guy is generating the SPAM from the location outside US, he is doing it for his master sitting there in US.
Now, who is the real badguy?
Lame reply to my own comment, but forgot something.
The majority of U.S.-sourced SPAM I receive comes from the following ISPs:
Comcast
Road Runner
EarthLink
Pacbell
Ameritech
In that order.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
All depends who's counting, I guess.
Yeah, right...
If I were counting, that would be more like 99% than 42%, sadly.
More precisely, I'd say that 42% of the spam being relayed from computers in the US sounds about right. But when it comes to the target audience, or the companies/individuals behind the spamvertised goods/services/scams, it suddenly looks like a 99% american problem in my (and most people's) view.
I had already commented on this
Sad, but certainly not Slashdot headline-worthy.
From my observations I find that Americans hire the Koreans and Chinese and send there junk from there ip space.
... but funded by an american(s)
Korean/'insert country name here' send spam - yes
Now in the case of Robert Solaway (as seen on spamhaus) I find he uses borked windoze boxes worldwide to send his junk (he also hosts in China - well thats what the dns reports)
Murky stuff this.
Send Peter Clifford Francis Macrae comdoms to 23 Bedford St, St.Neots, PE19 1AX, England
Just after Christmas last year I noticed quite an uptick in spam attempts on my mailserver from U.S. residential broadband IPs. Clearly this was from new computers received as Christmas gifts getting quickly zombied.
All the people who came downstairs this year to find a shiny new Dell or Gateway under the tree should be getting their machines owned by spammers right about..... now. So prepare for another post-Christmas onslaught as the spammers play with all their newly-acquired toys.
~Philly
Just because you're a mentally challenged, nazi-voting, mouth-breathing American doesn't give you the right to condescend to other countries. Apart from that, most of the spam I get advertises American websites, American fake Rolex watches and American drugs - in fact, I can use that as a pretty good spamfilter, since I'm a German living in Germany; I need only check for American English as the language and can dump it in my spam folder.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
I can believe Comcast is still #1. That's my ISP and the number of spams I get (not to mention the number of worm propagation attempts) from Comcast addresses is remarkable. Of course, they do have a lot of IPs. I do know that, in my area at least, they've implemented a policy whereby if you send more than some {undefined} number of emails within some {undefined} interval, SMTP access is suspended automatically. I know because I had accidentally set my mail server to bounce unknown messages back to the sender. Since I receive over a thousand spams a day that made me a spammer, so far as Comcast was concerned. Okay, my bad ... but Comcast couldn't be bothered to let me know what was going on. Their assumption was that I was deliberately spamming: the fact that I might have been zombied didn't seem to occur to them. All I knew was that my SMTP access had been blocked, for no apparent reason, and their tech support had no idea what was going on. I finally found a person who had a clue, and he said it would take a couple of days for my access to return automatically.
I hear all kinds of noise about how to deal with spam from the standpoint of broadband users running as unwitting spam relays. Everything from "make it the ISPs responsibility" to "require users to get training and get a license in order to get online". What is the real solution? I don't know, but anything that requires passing a Federal law will probably cause more harm than good. Doesn't mean they won't try to pass one, though.
Personally, I liken people that run unprotected, unpatched machines as being "bad neighbors". You know the kind: the one that lets his dog run free and crap all over your yard. Yes, I realize that most of these zombied systems are in that situation because of the ignorance of their owners. But if that neighbor started building a garage extension on your side of the property line, you wouldn't let him off the hook because he couldn't read a survey.
People don't really think of security as being a social issue as well as a personal one. I believe that most people want to be good neighbors, and would take steps if you reported their dog taking a dump on your property. But there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of zombies out there whose owners have no idea that their systems are crapping in everyone's back yard. Somehow, we need to close the loop on these people so they a. know that they've been taken over and b. give them easy, effective steps to take care of the problem. Tall order, I know. Comcast is heading in the right direction with their policy, but they need to let people know when they've been disabled, and why. Maybe they are now, I don't know.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.