US and China Top List of Spam-Relaying Countries

jcatcw writes "On Thursday Sophos released a new set of global statistics pointing out the biggest spam relaying countries in the world. Toping the list between April and June of this year were the US and China. 'Sophos senior security consultant Carole Theriault said that while the U.S. remains the top spam dog, there results show an urgent need for countries to join together and take global action. "Once a machine is compromised, it is often used to send out spam for a variety of campaigns," she said. "In a matter of seconds, we can see compromised systems send messages on a dozen different topics from stock scams to diet drugs." Paul Ducklin, Sophos Asia Pacific head of technology, said that spammers are ready to "borrow" any computer illegally to send e-mail regardless of the location.'"

Comments

Great Firewall needs Reconfigured.

[Gabrill]

Too bad that "Great Firewall" doesn't work both ways. Shame, really.

Europe getting in on the action too

[antifoidulus]

If you want to count the EU as one country(which the EU seems to want to do for things that benefit it, but seem wont to do when the statistics are less than flattering) Europe reigns supreme:

Europe now has six entries in the Dirty Dozen, which when combined, account for even more spam-relaying than the U.S.

Whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

But you don't understand. In America, we're free to send spam. In China, they send spam because their government is evil.

In other words ...

[ScrewMaster]

the countries with the most bandwidth available to the general population, and which also have the greatest number of Windows installations and open mail relays, also produce the most spam. Hardly a surprising conclusion.

Those statistics are EXTREMELY misleading

[tempestdata]

As a mail provider I wouldn't be surprised that the US and china were the source of a significant chunk of spam. They (the US especially) have a LOT of email users. What I'm interested is the ratio of good email to spam email. For instance, if the US makes up for 90% of all email sent, then is it really that bad if it makes up 25% of the world's spam? On the other hand Mexico may make up 1% of the world's email, but 90% of the email coming from there could be spam.

The volume of spam should be taking in the context of the usage of email. The RATIO of legit emails to spam is a better indicator of where the spammers are coming from than volume alone

Our efforts seem to be paying off

[aszaidi]

I'm glad to see no mention of Pakistan in there. It used to be one of the biggest sources of spam until recently. I work for a large ISP here and we take spam seriously. We recently started blocking all outbound emails from customers, restricting them to our state-of-the-art (Linux + Exim + SA etc.) servers. Even now, a single Spamcop report can have offending customer's email completely blocked. Corporate user or no corporate user.

The bigger task is getting all the other ISPs in the country to agree to implement this instead of bending over backwards to please their customers and allow them to broadcast whatever their virus-infected PCs can conjure. The major technical players have formed a network-admins group which discusses such topics and so far, the response has been quite positive.

It will likely take a while before these types of policies are enforced in countries which are only just starting to get online.

Re:Since spam relays have shifted from servers....

[ptbarnett]

And the solution to zombies on broadband is really simple.

Blocking port 25 outbound is a strategic nuclear strike, where all that is needed is a carpenter's hammer.

However, I wouldn't be opposed to it as long as:

• Applying for an exemption is as simple as filling out a online form, without talking to someone in an India call center and explaining why I want it done.

• Third-party mail servers universally implement port 587 (the Mail Submission Agent port), while requiring username/password authentication.

Instead of Top Overall

[Nom du Keyboard]

Instead of just giving a top overall count of who's sending spam, how about a figure weighted by how many connected computers are in the country overall? If China sends a bit less than the USA, but the USA has 10X as many broadband connected computers, then Chinese computers are far more vulnerable to this sort of activity, and focus preventative measures there to mitigate the problem. Under those circumstances, the USA problem might be dealt with in a different way than the Chinese problem, but without this curcial information, who knows?