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Sophos Reveals Latest Spam-Relaying Countries
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in more than two years, the United States has failed to make inroads into its spam-relaying problem. The U.S. remains stuck at the top of the chart and is the source of 23.2 percent of the world's spam. Its closest rivals are China and South Korea, although both of these nations have managed to reduce their statistics since Q1 2006. The vast majority of this spam is relayed by 'zombies,' also known as botnet computers."
I'm not sure why they divide by country. Are they implying that the laws and regulations of these companies should be stricter? Is this some sort of international contest to see who can restrict the rights of its internet users the fastest? The fact is that these nations are just relaying the spam. They might not be the origin of the spam so it's not like targeting a nationality will help.
Furthermore, these percentages don't appear to be normalized in any way. Does the United States contain more than 23% of the world's internet traffic? Probably. What about the sheer number of IPs assigned to citizens? Again, probably more than 23% of the world's total user population. Even if it isn't that high, it'd still show that countries like China are doing ok relative to the sheer number of users they have. I think this study only showed that spam is directly proportionate to internet usage. And nothing more.
Logically, you would divide by source or company or--better yet--ISP. I think the penalties should come from the companies that make money providing the internet service to the sources of the spam. Even if it's a bot or open relay for spam, the ISP should investigate it and shut it down. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see Cox & Comcast show up on that list as they are so unbelievably careless.
I think laws against the internet service providers are in order to force this but it's difficult to track. That's why Sophos should publish names of internet service providers and drag them through the mud, I don't care about countries. And how about making the penalty for the ISP a bit tougher as in you get one warning about a particular user and then you're restricted from providing internet service?
In the end, you have to ask yourself--do we really want to make this a responsibility of all governments? I think the answer is 'no' considering that they can always just open up some operation in another nation and find an ISP dying for cash. Then you have to chase them there.
My work here is dung.
"Follow the money"
What's so hard here? The US has pushed for having banks and financial service companies to be more open with governments on who is doing what with transactions.
There's always the content, too. Just look in the emails and they have telephone numbers, web sites, the various means of seeing what these scumbags have to offer and how to contact them.
Educating the public is failing. Why? How many public service ads have you seen advising people how to protect themselves from being scammed, preventing identity theft, etc.? I've seen none. I see private ads OF the voice overs of the big dude with the girl's voice, where his identity has been stolen, I think it was for a paper shreader of all things.
Sophos must be with the terrorists as they are not proclaiming victory in the war on terror. Enough has been made of the suspicion (has anything been proved?) that terrorists raise funds this way. I wouldn't put it past them, but I also wouldn't put it past some russian teenagers with limited career potential in Putin's New And Improved USSR.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No wonder the tubes are jammed.
For the lack of a better sig.
...is how many of the zombie systems are actually deliberatly set up by the owner. Not some accidental "gone to the wrong web site" setup, but some "I'm gonna make some bucks serving spam" and then claiming they didn't know they were infected.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
It would seem to me that they have only network bandwidth and happier customers to gain by taking action.
If, in fact, the problem is naive, unprotected users, wouldn't a complimentary firewall and de-rootkitter CD be appreciated, and benefit both user and ISP?
... if you just opened up port 25 on EVERY machine and put some dummy SMTP recieve code behind it that did nothing else other than accept mail and then discard it, could we make it 500 million times harded for spammers to find an active and working open relay?
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=ver izonbusiness.com
This is to be expected by a company that bought SpewSpew.net
Sadly, any trick (even as drastic as I've suggested) would only be temporary. People still click on random .exe files (and scripts) as fast as they come in. Any Dilbert, South Park, or Pokemon screensaver will be clicked on my some nitwit. I see the forum posts about how certain screensavers don't work. Well, of course they don't -- they're not screensavers, they're little servers designed to relay spam.
Given the vast numbers of idiots, and amateurs online here in the U.S., of course we're in the lead. (I have two teens -- both of them have clicked on evil .exe's -- firing off malicious code warnings on the Windows machines).
Educating the gajillion newly techno-blessed is the only way to get this under control.
How hard is it to understand, "If a stranger gives you an apple -- DON'T EAT IT!"
My ZooLoo
"The United States has the world's largest number of unsecured Windows machines, therefore making it painfully easy for anyone to become a spam king from the comfort of their own home by creating their own botnet."
Ja ne!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
At first I was looking at the numbers and wondering if Americans just have so many more Windows machines than the rest of the big relays out there, but once the numbers get into the single digits (everything after the US and China) I quickly realized that most of the people in those nations are probably using the same OS - Windows - as people in the US. So is it simply that the US comes out on top because we have so damned many computers - as opposed to other nations where they're sometimes uncommon in households and people use internet cafes? Or is it not a PCs-per-capita issue, but an issue of people in the USA simply being to stupid/lazy/etc. to secure their Windows machines? If the former is the case, we're in for some nasty spam as PCs per capita increase, and there are ever more systems begging to be infected. If the latter case is true, what will it take to finally get Windows users to start securing their Windows boxes?
And I thought pump & dump scams were primarily concocted around 2am at Frat parties.
Sophos recommends that computer users ensure they keep their security software up-to-date, as well as using a properly configured firewall and installing the latest operating system security patches.
----How long, how long must we sing this song?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The old saying goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."
Updated, it'd be "You can lead a user to clue, but you can't make him think."
As it applies here, the average user isn't going to understand (or want to understand) what benefit these free items will give him/her. They've never heard of a firewall or a rootkit. All they really care about is how much it costs.
Now if a service could show better profits through these steps (from reduced expenses, including bandwidth, support, etc) then we might be getting somewhere. But you're never going to get anywhere trying to educate the user.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The spammers actually test to see if they get an email from the server before using it as a relay server.
It would be interesting to see this arranaged by the operating system of the infected computer. Given the frequency of infections by OS and the frequency of the OS on the internet, I can use Bayes theorem to deermine how suceptable a computer is to become a Zombie spammer. Im just guessing that this would not be flattering number for Microsoft, espicially the older versions of Windows. This sort of information could be used by Microsoft to encourage upgrades and by everyone else to recommend migrating from Windows altogether. In either case, this would give users actionable information to reduce risk - moving to a 'low spam' country simply isn't actionable for most people. As you pointed out, showing data by ISP would also be actionable. In either case, it allows for users to have some control.
Think global, act loco
The vast majority of this spam is relayed by 'zombies,' also known as american citizens.
Dude, you meant British citizens.
Have you forgotten about Shaun of the Dead??
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It wouldn't cost anything, as it is complimentary.
Anyway, users, as you said, aren't too bright. Just put the firewall setup and de-rootkitter (and whatever else) into a CD labled "Setup" and the user will pop that right in. Hell, if you're feeling really audacious, put instructions on how to open your CD-ROM and insert the CD and then close it again, and what button to push on the Autorun in your setup pamphlet.
Lame UK humor. :(
As impractical as it might be, I, being a software developer think the best way to go about removing this crap isn't on the receiving end. It won't be fixed by filters. It won't be fixed by blockers. The way to fix it is through putting some sort of tax, fee, whatever you might have it, on email getting sent.
Before you flip out and throw the "OMGOOSES MY FREEDOM" argument around, answer me this:
If you were being sent text messages to your cellphone, and being charged ten cents per text message, how long would you tolerate that?
The reason nothing is being done to combat this is due to the fact that when people spend hours cleaning off spam, they aren't even thinkinga bout the "Time = Money" equation. If they were, I think they'd be pretty hot about getting the senders punished.
My experience is that around 60-75% of the spam I receive comes from China. On my home mail server I finally broke down and started blocking the worst offending subnets and the amount of spam I received dropped dramatically. There is a RBL for China, cn.blackhole.us, or a combination of China and Korea (cn-kr.blackhole.us), though these are no longer listed and will likely disappear soon.
? country=$ctry`;
print join "\n", /([0-9\.]+\/[0-9]+)/g;
I also use several other RBLs which have helped a lot.
I also decided to add the worst offending subnets in China as rules for my firewall to block. The worst offending subnet is 221.208.208.x where my firewall reports an almost constant barrage of IM spam, and from what I've read, this subnet has been a problem for years.
For your own blocking, the following script will get all the subnets used by China (or any other country you're interested in, just change $ctry):
#!/usr/bin/perl $ctry = shift || 'cn'; $_ = `wget -O - http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/ipv4-by-country.pl
At work, where I cannot do this, most of my spam is also received from China.
Out of the rest of the spam I receive, the US is actually pretty far down on the list of sources, though still much higher than places like the UK, Germany or France. The rest seems to come from places like Poland, Romania and Estonia.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
And why not stop and look at your comment and others: other than *ownership* of computers, the other major common factor here is Windows. It certainly isn't as though Microsoft isn't complicit in this. Look at the security holes and exploits and everything else that can be laid at their doorstep over the last, well, 5-7 years.
And before someone here tries to flame or mod me and say that Windows isn't the only thing you can write viruses for, yeah, silly, I know that. It's just that writing a virus for W32 / WinNT-class environments has always been made pretty much brain-dead simple by those folks from Redmond. If you want to write a virus for anything else, you actually have to know what you're doing to write code. You know, like the "good old days" of MS-DOS and Win1.x/2.x/3.x. Or Apple II. Or Amiga, etc.
I tend not to pay very much attention to the reports on the state of Internet or individual computer security when it comes from most public authorities, since they all like to dance blithely and blindly around Microsoft's (however unintentional) part in all this noise and nonsense. "Criticize Microsoft? We can't do that! We'll just pretend these problems are part-and-parcel of owning a computer! Heh heh! Nobody will notice!" The media needs to get a clue.
Oh, wait, it's the media. Nevermind... :(
unless US home users take action to secure their computers and put a halt to the zombie PC problem
Whoa.....
It's US home users fault that a convicted monopoly was not prosecuted ???
Really ?
I just wonder how the spam problem statistic would look if suddenly there was a linux client in every single computer in America
where there now stands Windows. (I mean immediately as in the flick of a light switch)
We don't use the 'Z' word.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
America was found to have the highest number of zombies and bots per capita....
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I haven't been keeping up on my anti-spam measures, lately, so I'm not sure if this has been considered, yet. Wouldn't it be possible to simply add a DNS record that allows a mail server to verify that the machine trying to send it mail is authorized to do so, for that domain?
A machine that supports it could ask the sending domain "Is this machine allowed to send email on your behalf?" The sending domain could simply answer "yes" or "no". That would immediately eliminate all the zombies, for those people who wanted to upgrade their DNS and mail software. It would also be backward compatible for people who couldn't. The best part is that could be controlled by the domain administrators, rather than some government agency or black hole list.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Its articles like these that lament people's basic misunderstanding of statistics. They use percentage of spam sent by countries in order to try to prove that spam is not being reduced in the United States. The problem is that simply relaying a percentage of total spam does not prove or disprove this point. It simply shows whether the US is changing more or less in proportion to other countries. Did the total number of spam messages go up or down? What about the total number of bot nets? The reality is that the total numbers could have gone down, and the US percentage still could have gone up depending on whether other countries went down further than the US. Percentages always add up to 100!
Whether it is a zombie, which is not supposed to have an SMTP server at all, or a legitimate mail-server fooled into relaying spam to you, my milter will black-list it for a few hours after your spam-detectors issue their first verdict against the relay.
Unlike with most blacklists, though, the damage from a false-positive is merely a delayed, rather than rejected (or, worse, dropped) message...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If the ISP's implemented a system whereby port 25 was closed and the average John Q. Public had to send mail through it's servers, or something else like GMail, then the vast majority of zombie spam would disappear overnight.
Then each customer could be limited to __ number of emails each day (perhaps 20). Beyond that they would have to log in and manually re-enable their account for another 20. People regularly exceeding their amount could apply for a higher threshhold.
A little inconvenient? Yes. More inconvenient than receiving 400 spams a day? I think not.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
According to the Computer Industry Almanac the U.S. uses 25% of the world's PCs. While I know our broadband penetration is not has high as other countries, we sure have a lot of hardware. Another thing to look at would be total messages in/out versus total messages claimed as spam. Sophos doesn't give us that piece of information. At least last year, Andrei Serjantov and Richard Clayton had done some work along those very lines in a paper found here. I don't know if they've updated it.
What I'd like is for broadband ISP's to at least make it harder for zombie'd systems to cause troubles; harder for zombie'd systems to communicate, etc. This particulary includes Cox, Comcast, etc.
I really wonder sometimes whether in the long run it might be cheaper for broadband ISP's to install a small firewall box between the customers computer and the internet for EVERY connection; similar to what Verizon seems to be doing for all connections to their FIOS (fiber optics to the home) service.
My ISP has a pretty good filter and they hold what is blocked for a week. When I access my "help mail" file everything is identified by country. Two months ago close to two thirds was from the US and it all got forwarded to the FTC. Today that is down to about 40% from the US and I still forward everything to the FTC. They do file many charges against spammers every month and the US amount is dropping.
I suspect that if things were traced all the way through that many of the US and offshore groups are related and working for or in partnership with each other. If the top five "spam cartels" were taken down I think we would see a 75% or more drop in SPAM worldwide.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
"It's worrying to see so many pump-and-dump emails - often with embedded graphics included - being spammed out to the general public," added Cluley. "The people that act upon these emails aren't skilled investors, and don't realise that purchasing the shares is likely to reap no reward, benefiting only the spammers, while creating a financial rollercoaster for the organisation in question."
Why is this worrying, in the sense that it needs to be mentioned explictly?
Most of the general public is not medically educated either, yet we have received spam about all sorts of pills for a long time.
And many do not know what 419 is, yet lots of those mails are sent as spam.
Lots of the spam I receive is in far-east languages which most western citizens are not skilled to read.
SPAM in itself is worrying, but there is nothing especially worrying about pump-and-dump.
Dude, you gotta check your links!
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
You can critisize AOL for everything except their anti-spam stance, I wish more providers would take spam as seriously.
Alternatively, if the spammer/zombie computer has port 25 open itself, have a netfilter rule that rewrites the destination address to that of the sender, increases the TTL, and sends the packets back in duplicate. Again, this is a resource-draining scheme. If it's an open relay, it'll get the spam and resend it. I believe the hop count for SMTP is something like 30 and each packet will go two ways along the wire, so it'll take 2^31 as much bandwidth overall, if a sufficiently large number of users set up this kind of loopback. Companies that simply don't care if their machines are zombies will suddenly notice a degradation of their networks but any packet monitoring they do will show all of the packets to have the IP addresses of their machines for both source and destination. At least some will zombie detox to save their sanity.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Any serious mail site does not use windows.
So one solution is sniff ports a little. If it is windows, it is assume to be insecure, and probably spam infected.
I presume that the handful of legitamate microsoft mail servers can be white listed.
Well I always go back to the example of a relative of mine who asked "What in the world would some hacker want with my PC"? They don't have a grasp of what access to even a Pentium 100 on a dial-up can be used for. They don't realize that spamming is pulled off with a "death by 1000 paper cuts" approach. How many average users could even grasp the concept of a computing cluster? Not everyone can or wants to understand this stuff. To them, it's just more time wasting useless crap when all they want to do is get on the net and play.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
https://nssg.trendmicro.com/nrs/reports/rank.php?p age=1
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Oh my, what else I should know.
Who designed or allow to be designed all the software that is used for spam, virus and other technodangerous programs? Sure, all the unwitting unsuspecting people out there that treat their computer as a black box should be ashamed of themselves. To use a windows computer safely these days requires a strong predilection to research and remembering security bulletins and knowing specifically how a computer does things. Which in of itself requires knowing about security models, social engineering, UI design and understaning geek lingo.
/nod /nod".
In short windows computers are no longer general use. Do you realize the implications of that statement? Well yes, of course you do gentle reader. Just this past month my mother called me her laptop died. Turned out a virus got in and overwrote some system files for Windows 2k. This is after telling her to not click on executables in emails, not answer any emails from banks without calling them, and plenty of other things that I read about daily. Even with constant reminders (voice and email) telling her to push the update button on AVG and looking at the results log and telling me if any red stop signs show up. She is now using a backup computer that I had laying around. This is Windows XP professional, installed with all the security trimmings (which shouldn't even be necessary on some level) of zone alarm, avg, and spybot - all setup to run automatically. I suggested that she get a mac mini for her next computer. She is thinking about it.
Yes windows has gotten better about educating users, but only after the situation is so bad that almost nothing can stop it. Vista betas already have viruses. That's insane!
Face it, this country has the most educated, nothing to do, do anything for business minded people ever. Heck the corporations are willfully fleecing the public and most of the them don't care that it's hapenning! "It's ok coming from us, because we use friendly advertising icons.
Makes me sick.
I see this illistrated every time I listen to the podcast of Leo Laporte's KFI radio show. Every show he has at least one call about spyware where he tells people the exact same things: Get a router, run spybot, adaware, windows defender. The people seem so clueless when he tells them that. I can understand that people aren't experts on things, but it is litterally the same advice every week. Weren't these people listening last week? If they've never listened before, then how did they know about the show in the first place? It just baffles me. Whether or not you think that is the best advice, I just don't understand how these people haven't heard it before.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I being from the USA and also working for an ISP would have to say its a mix of both. USA does have more PCs in homes then most other countries (also more data centers with servers). It also has a lot of Defective End Users (DEU's) that just don't know whats out there and how their computer can get infected.
I cleaned over 120 spyware and viruses off my sisters computer one time. I yelled at her and told her i wouldn't fix it till she at least got a irewall router to help block some or most of the incoming crap and also made her run a software firewall that won't allow outgoing connecting without clicking on "Allow" button on a popup.
I think people over the age of 40 that have less then 2 years internet usage should take some kind of internet class before using the internet.
None of it would exist at all if the END USER stopped buying viagra every time they get an offer in their inbox..
However, I would applaud a spamming company that slowly removed non-responsive email addresses from their spam lists and tailored their spam only to those few users who respond
Will program for karma.
Once upon a time not long ago I decided to track down where the spam I was getting came from. I did this for about a month and in that month 99.9% of the spam I received came from what appeared to be zombie "Windows" machines. When are people going to call this out as what it really is, yet another Microsoft problem. You can find my tracking results here:
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/spam/
Void
My provider prevents me from sending to SMTP ports outside of my domain, for better or for worse. This got me thinking:
- would it be possible to selectivley block ports?
- provide an ISP based UI, where you could unblock ports based on your account?
- if both above are doable, what over head would this provide?
- maybe provide different default configurations based on the type of user you are (technophobe, newbie, average home user, business user, power user, etc)
- how well would such a solution go down?
Sure you could ask everyone to install the equivalent of zone alarms, but this is not always going to happen.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Its all about the money.. If the customer is paying their bill then let them do as they want. At least that my companies way of thinking.. and i hate it but i also need the job seeing IT jobs are running thin in the USA.
"I really wonder sometimes whether in the long run it might be cheaper for broadband ISP's to install a small firewall box between the customers computer and the internet for EVERY connection..."
I concur - the need for a good hardware firewall is not new, it seems like it would be simple for every cable/DSL internet device provided to a consumer to include an easily managed firewall - it's not like most ISPs don't pass that cost along to the consumer, if not rent them the device outright. Of course, it could also end up generating a high volume of tech support calls for every dumb kid out there who demands help to configure the modem to allow him to run a CS server.
The cost just isn't apparent. Companies spend money on spam filters, virus scanners, etc. and pass these costs on to the consumer in one way or another. Money is being spent on email, just not directly.
-nosebreaker.com
I see a number of people asking the question "But how many computers are there per country?" I found the numbers at:
http://www.c-i-a.com/pr0904.htm
Here's what they show. I've added the % of spam coming from each country as the last entry in each line:
Top 15 Countries in Internet Usage
Internet Users (#X1000) Users% Spam%
1. U.S. 185,550 19.86 23.2% of spam
2. China 99,800 10.68 20.0%
3. Japan 78,050 8.35 1.6%
4. Germany 41,880 4.48 2.5%
5. India 36,970 3.96 N/A
6. UK 33,110 3.54 1.8%
7. South Korea 31,670 3.39 7.5%
8. Italy 25,530 2.73 3.0%
9. France 25,470 2.73 5.2%
10. Brazil 22,320 2.39 3.1%
11. Russia 21,230 2.27 N/A
12. Canada 20,450 2.19 N/A
13. Mexico 13,880 1.49 N/A
14. Spain 13,440 1.44 4.8%
15. Australia 13,010 1.39 N/A
Top 15 Countries 662,360 70.88
Worldwide Total 934,480 100
It looks like the USA's numbers are right about on track with most other countries with China way out in front as to percent of the spam problem compared to percent of Internet connected computers. What's this? France has twice the percent of spams relaying through their country compared to the percent of Internet users? For shame!
But why is the rum gone?
Last time I posted, I somehow offended a few americans who mistakenly took my attack on climate-change nay-sayers as an attack on America and americans as whole: it resulted in DoS on my sites and a joe-job campaign against my public mail servers.
Polute the world, polute our mailboxes, and be damned anyone who dares question whether this is moral or not!
Funny thing is: my spam filters are now much improved! Thanks!
TODO: 753) write sig.
So is it simply that the US comes out on top because we have so damned many computers - as opposed to other nations where they're sometimes uncommon in households and people use internet cafes?
ISTR I saw some statistics a while ago suggesting that the UK had a far higher DSL/cable connections to people ratio than most other countries (I think even more than the US). Yet the UK is pretty low down on the list of spammers. Admittedly the UK population is lower than the US population though - they really need to adjust those figures into "spams per citizen" or "spams per internet connection" to make them meaningful enough to draw conclusions about user cluefulness.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
we are sorry that the microsoft viruses make you angry
That's exactly what the ISP's in the Netherlands do you get a (NAT)router with wireless support for example.
With wireless support, which is not fully open, but properly secured by default.
New things are always on the horizon
Well I'm here in Canada, and we're apparently not even in the top-10 for spam, so there's a good chance that the local political/corporate environment affects the internet. Not that I've heard of us having big anti-spam laws here (and I do remember hearing about some big spammers living down east), but perhaps the ISP's are more vigilant.
/.'s warnings that they detected me as an open relay) I had my connection borked by my ISP because they had received complaints. All it took was a phone-call to explain that the situation had been fixed and things were back up and running. I think they watched it for recurrence for awhile after that but I had no hassles.
I know that at one point I had been messing around with my proxy settings and that allowed it to be abused as an open relay. Consequently, there were about 1-2 days where some bastard(s) used it to send spam. About 2-3 days after that (after I'd caught it and shut it down, partly because of
So at the least, it seems that "Telus" in Canada does do something about the open relays. Unfortunately they seem to suffer from suckage lately for other reasons, but at least they're trying to keep their network 'clean' from usual misuse and abuse of spammers et al.
I would like to see a per-capita or per-connection statistic for this. I notice that Canada isn't up there on that list, but they do have a lesser population than China/USA (though probably more than many of the others), and alternately a pretty high ratio of connectivity per household/business.
How about a graph of "# of known connections in country vs amount of spam). If country X is only contributing 2% of the spam, but they've got 2% of the overall population and only 25% of that is connected... it shows a little more how the local control on such things may be a bit... lax.
Anyway, users, as you said, aren't too bright. Just put the firewall setup and de-rootkitter (and whatever else) into a CD labled "Setup" and the user will pop that right in.
And their computer will be clean and safe... right up until the baddies start handing out their own CDs.
What about middle malware? The thought occurs that it's far easier to pervert an SMTP server and bribe an ISP to run it than it is to herd spambots over the edge.
Most Americans == stupid
Therefore:
Most American sysadmins == incompetent.
> I yelled at her and told her i wouldn't fix it till she at least got a irewall router
I'm sorry, I can't hear you yelling at me -- my irewall is blocking it.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
U S A!! U S A!! U S A!!
oh wait..
filerfilterfilterfilterfilter
Maybe "SPAM Per Capita with Broadband Connectivity" would be a more meaningful statistic.
It would take some legal craftwork to do make this workable, but credit card issuers could help tackle the SPAM problem by creating special-purpose honeypot card numbers that could not be collected on. The up front documentation requirements would be severe on a "defraud the fraudsters" approach like this, lest the system become a social malady of its own. In fact, the sting would probably have to be executed by law enforcement personnel. Still, much currently sent SPAM is in violation of existing laws, so all tactics that law enforcement has at its disposal should be on the table in the crimesolving process... including deception and baiting.
The SPAM problem isn't intractable at the technology level though; it's ultimately social factors that are holding up a technological solution anyway. A reputation protocol for domains & IP addresses would do the trick, were a next-gen mail protocol to ride on top of it. At the request of any receiving server, outbound servers would be responsible for validating their sending of a message. A permanent send log for every server would be maintained through distributed storage. Servers would need to *earn* unrestricted inbound access to other servers. Users would have direct whitelist control for inbound messages to their own boxes, and by default, messages requiring priveleges beyond the sending server's current authorization would generate permission requests to a dynamically-configurable destination, e.g. the final recipient or the sysadmin, depending on conditions like number of requests the server is generating, the nature of available reputation data for the server, etc.
Pi Ran Out
What "baddies"? I am talking about an official CD that came from your ISP, not a free AOL frisbey from the junk mail, or some guy in a back alley. What spammer is going to start handing out CDs on the side of the road, and who would actually take them, much less take the time to run them, if they did?
Unless you're implying some rogue ISP handing out villianious CDs in an effort to ruin people's computers or something.
- USA: 23.2% of world spam, 20.1% of world internet users
- China: 20.0% of world spam, 10.9% of world internet users
- S. Korea: 7.9% of world spam, 3.3% of world internet users
So adjusted for internet user population, the US puts out 23.2/20.1 = 1.15, or 15% more spam than expected. China puts out 20.0/10.9 = 1.83, or 83% more spam than expected. South Korea puts out 7.9/3.3 = 2.39, or 139% more spam than expected. I got the internet population stats from: http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htmPerl + Geo::IP 200601-200607
US 28.1%
CN 10.0%
UA 8.5%
KR 5.2%
DE 4.7%
FR 3.5%
PL 3.5%
ES 3.0%
IN 2.8%
BR 2.6%
IT 2.6%
RU 2.4%
JP 1.9%
GB 1.8%
CA 1.6%
TR 1.4%
NL 1.3%
MX 1.3%
CZ 1.0%
(Limit >= 1%)
#1, don't give the spammers any ideas, and
#2 you'd be surprised how stupid some people are. Remember the "web accellerator" scam a few years ago? I bet if you put "Makes your computer 500% faster!!!!!!1" on a CD, people would run it.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Tarpits are a fine thing to do with a spare IP address or a machine that wasn't going to run SMTP (unless your ISP blocks port 25, of course :-) - set up a domain name or subdomain that points to the tarpit, splatter some email addresses around the net for the harvesters to find, and start tracking IP addresses. It's more fun if the spammer thinks you're an open relay and starts pumping lots of their other spam into your tarpit, but that's *so* five years ago; you can still be a good target address.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you're proposing charging for email, you need to think about who's charging whom for doing what - if you get it wrong, then it's doomed to fail, but if you identify the economic actors and actions correctly, then people may or may not use your system but at least they won't hate you.
The fundamental transaction is that the reader is charging the sender for reading the mail and setting the price based on the sender, and the market will determine whether any senders are sufficiently interested in installing the payment software and paying the price to reach a given user, and the market will also determine whether a typical reader alienates too many of his friends and acquaintences to keep using it. The price might not be cash - it might be a Captcha image recognition, or even a simple "click here to acknowledge that you received my handshake mail", or it might be some token or micropayment system that might or might not succeed in the market.
You can deploy this kind of system for *your* *own* email without forcing everybody else in the world to adopt it. If the price and required effort to send you mail is non-zero, you'll eliminate most spammers right away, but you'll also eliminate some people you did want to hear from; it's your choice and theirs. And you're providing a valuable service to the world by testing the various kinds of software like this that are already out there, and by helping determine the market price for your attention.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
URLs for responses are another - for a while those were largely in China, but now zombies are starting to provide those services.
Following the money is really the fun part, but that one's hard, and of course that's easy for a spammer to obfuscate (e.g. open a small corporation in a tax-haven country to receive the loot, and launder the profits by buying things from the real spammer at high prices or selling them below-market.)
But identifying whatever characteristics of the spammer that you can helps you figure out tools to deal with the problem. For instance, my ISP lets me block or filter email by sending country - I don't know anybody in China, Korea, or Nigeria, so I block all SMTP sent from there, and I don't know many people from Japan, so I accept email from there but put it in the extra-filtering bucket. It cut down my spam significantly when I started, though of course spammers continue to be clever. ["Rule 2" says that they're stupid, but that doesn't mean that they're not also clever....]
Sorting by countries does provide some suggestions about where or whether regulation might be useful - though in practice it's usually not helpful, e.g. the US You-CAN-SPAM law, and China's Great Firewall. But it also lets you look at different markets and different technologies - for instance, even though adding more oppressive regulations in China would be a Bad Thing, getting the China Netcom and China Telecom duopolists to provide details about specific spammers or respond to large volumes of complaints can be good. Knowing that Cable Modems in the US or Elementary Schools in Korea tend to have infected machines can help you know what DNSBLs you might want to use, or which ISPs to send complaints to.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
American citizens are known as sheeple. They believe that it's okay to give up basic freedoms such as the right to communicate at will, anonymously and in private, so that a handful of spammers will be inconvenienced. They will gladly let Ma Bell, Big Brother and No Such Agency listen in on their party line. They will allow the Three Stuges to compile blacklists and cheer on as Joe Somebody "blacklists the world". They worship W, and bestow him with more executive powers than a price, so he can order all ISPs in the land to keep tabs on you and your email and the horse you rode in on. They worry incessantly that free email will clog the tubes, and demand postage and tolls and your first born to deliver your missive. Sanitized for your protection!
Well, perhaps not all of them, but certainly the moral majority. Freedom Fries, anyone?
Maybe I should have clarified my point :o)
;o)
I was just hinting that it is really the fools who have high speed net access, left on 24-7 but do not bother to consider computer security who are too blame - not the computers themselves.
From my comment rating I guess my point was lost. Maybe less british comedy next time
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Let me see if I can explain what I mean. I am an end user. I am trying to send email from my home PC, using Thunderbird to my private, hosting company supplied, password protected, smtp server. AOL is hijacking this email (sent from port 25) so my hosting company has set up the smtp server to accept (password authenticated) connections from me (using thunderbird) on another port. How is this not exactly what you are describing? Sorry if I am not clear/using correct terminology...