Spam from Taiwan

TristanGrimaux writes "According to a recent study done by CipherTrust, two thirds of the world's spam is sent by Taiwan servers. The US follows with 24% and in a distant third is China with only 3% of the servers who actually sends the spam." The article cites easy access to broadband and lack of crackdown on offenders as the main contributing factors.

Comments

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Whats specific about Taiwan?

[Heir Of The Mess]

Having been to Taiwan a fair bit I can think of some possibilities:-

Most people I know there earn about US$15k/yr, and upgrading the RAM in your Pentium3 machine and then the Hard Drive, and then the video card is sort of common practice. Forking out big $$ for Windows XP isn't real easy so a lot of people are running some SP1 version of Windows XP they bought for $1 off the street, and this version gets owned pretty fast, and can't be patched from windows update. So there are lots of bots.

Now 24Mbit internet access is like $5-$10 per month, so you can see there is quite a big engine there for generating spam.

The culture there is such that they love the latest thing, so I could imagine that there would also be a tendency for people to install software off the net that has malware in it as well.

Another thing I noticed is that your average grandmother there seems quite good at using a computer. So I could imagine that there might be more pensioner types sitting there doing some amount of spamming for a little bit of money.

Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT

[BrynM]

That's a cool project for a Windows honeypot. Thanks for the link. Outside of honeypots, I've been blanket filtering addresses from APNIC on my mail server for about a year now using some ideas I learned from this project (I filter at the mail request level rather than iptables). It's sad to filter an entire geographic region like that, but my users never talk to people from the Pacific Rim that I know of. My server (running XMail) is small, but my logs for the filtered emails constantly show the spam blocked exceeds the number of legit mails by a factor of four.

Since I started filtering, I've turned a couple of other admins onto the idea. I wonder if TW/KR will find themselves in some odd form of network segregation in the future as more people adopt the practice of filtering their IPs. That might push the authorities into a little more action.

Re:Survey Says?

[Technician]

More like follow the offshore bank accounts, Grand Cayman Islands, etc.

I lived there. Internet access is expensive as it was a government protected monopoly. Check the rates. Cable and Wireless is the company. To visit, see www.candw.ky.

When they first put in internet, they got 2 satelite T1 links for the whole island. Little Cayman and Cayman Brac still did not have internet. They charged $0.25/minute for access on dial up.

Needless to say I didn't get internet until I returned to the states.

They have since gotten a Fiber Optic cable to Jamaca and they now offer DSL. They are running a promotion for $25/month for the first year. That is CI $ not USD. The price is close to US $30/month. Restrictions such as can't compete with the phone company by using VOIP is the norm.
The plan appears to be capped at 256K unless you upgrade to a faster plan. For example the 1024 plan is CI $74. The 512 plan is $59.

Cayman Islands is a nice place to go for diving and sun, but not for internet based business.

You can easily fight with spammers.

[Snipergrunge]

By the way... Most spammers who sent you letters to visit their web pages want's you to click their Google adSense ads. So, help them! Keep clicking Google banner untill your arm get tired and guess what happened. Google will close their account in one second because Google systems will decide that advertiser trying to cheat. It is impossible to open account again! SPAMMER DEAD!

Re:SPAM origins

[Haeleth]

It got so bad, I just started block entire class A's from countries I know
I am not going to email to or from.
[...]
81

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the IP allocation system. Class A networks are not associated with single countries, but with registries. 81, for example, is one of the networks administered by the RIPE NCC; an IP address beginning with 81 could be located anywhere within Europe or the Middle East.

In fact, my very own IP address begins with 81. I live in Britain, which - as you may be aware - is not in "Asia,
Latin America, or Eastern Europe". It's a good thing I don't want to email you, isn't it?