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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."
... 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?
It already exists, its called an SPF record. Its been around for years now and 95% of domains don't have one.
There is also nothing stopping the spammers from using SPF, and they do. In fact, in many surveys the spammers are registering domains and using SPF *more* than legitimate users are. SPF does mitigate some spoofing issues, but that's about it.
On its own its proven worthless. As part of more cohesive anti-spam strategy it might prove to have some value.
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.
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