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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.
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.
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)