New Spam Site Found Every Three Seconds
Stony Stevenson writes "New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam. The data from Sophos also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds. For the first time Turkey's contribution to the global spam problem puts it in the top three offending countries. Compromised computers in Turkey are now responsible for relaying 5.9 percent of the world's junk email, compared to 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 2007."
I love it. I can sync my computer to it.
Third placed Turkey and tenth placed UK are wthin a +- 6% band, probably close to the margin of error in the analysis.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I never get spam, I have my school email address I use for trusted sites and people while everything else goes to a yahoo account. The yahoo account is filled with spam, but since I only have to check the newest mail whenever I use it its not a big deal. Am I missing something here?
If spam gives you a pain in the balls, you are eating it wrong.
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Movin' UP!
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE
Enjoy!
I thought Turkey was a Muslim country, isn't spam some sort of shoulder meat? Oh right, they're secular.
Yes, sir! something should be done about spam!
And, while we're at it, someone should really do something about domain squatting.
Oh year, and what about phishing? Why isn't anyone doing anything about that!?
Seriously, guys; get on it. I'll be watching the third season of Seinfeld DVD.
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
Which once again proves Sturgeon's Law which states that 90% of everything is crap. Or 92.3% in this case. Luckily for me gMail is pretty good at filtering the crap, son I only see about 1 spam for every 10 real emails. However, if I look in my junk folder, and compare that to the number of valid emails I receive, I would say that 99% of it is spam.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I didn't think it was possible.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
I know that my email (especially in my older accounts) certainly matches the rate of spam in excess of 90% by volume.
And the part about a new spam site created every 3 seconds shouldn't surprise anyone either. As much as people despise spam, there is still money to be made in it. Thats why people continue to send spam, of course. Thats also why people continue to buy new domain names to sell discount "drugs" and "software".
This just tells us what many of us already knew. The spam problem will continue to get worse until we actually apply a economic solution to this economic problem.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You think it's bad now, wait until the spammers can faceboogle you.
ASSP
30 minutes to install on an exchange server... filters out all the spam.
I run it on all my clients, and they average about 95% of all mail intercepted as spam with a zero false positive rate.
http://assp.sourceforge.net/
Chuck
What everyone gets in their mailbox are mainly American spam messages intended mainly for Americans, sent via hijacked Windows computers around the world. There's also a significant fraction of messages intended for a handful of other rich countries, but the only third world country seriously contributing their own spam is probably Nigeria.
But the 1st number, the amount new web pages related to spam, needs to be explained a bit more. The original Sophos report at least explain that are the related to the web links included with the mails, but not sure if that implies more spam realted domains, more spam related servers or if the big numbers are more related to different ways to write urls in the same servers,
Sorry, I don't trust a product that evokes "ass pee" with spam protection. :P
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
First it was their entry into Eurovision, now they are getting up there in the Spam stakes... what next Turkey? What next?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
"But this does not mean that other countries can give up the fight."
That's right, it's still early in the year, no one is down and out quite yet. Plenty of chances for any up-and-comer to catch up and make an appearance on the leaderboard - who knows what the second quarter may hold!
I was wondering if anyone had any numbers on the market share of IE vs other browsers in Turkey. A few quick google searches were hesitant to reveal anything.
.ru is simply discarded. For me this is a 100% filter that doesn't have any false positives. Nigeria is second on the list.
More interesting is the ratio of infected computers. It isn't stated. But take the population of the US and the Population of Turkey and do a comparison. The other interesting number is the number in Russia. Russia has a large population, but how many of them even own a computer or have internet? Something tells me they have a very high proportion of infected machines. This is most likely due to Microsoft and their WGA program keeping most of those machines unpatched and vulnerable as the population in general can't spend several months wages for a genuine copy.
It's bad enough that anything ending in
Everything else left then goes to spam filters. This lightens the load.
The truth shall set you free!
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (*) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(*) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(*) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(*) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(*) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The reality is that a single sale of "herbal \/1agr4" can mean a profit for the spammer. The cost of spamming is that low for them.
In order to make it economically unsound for the spammers, you'd have to make it economically annoying for the rest of humanity. More annoying than simply putting up with the spam.
UNLESS we get rid of the stupid CAN-SPAM law and allow each state to institute its own anti-spam laws and allow citizens in those states to sue the spammers for violating those laws.
Yeah, this will hurt "legitimate" fucking "email marketing" companies
Turkish Spam KISS YOU! IT KISS YOU!!! It loving sex with all the womens of the world!
I personally advocate "don't be a douche" vigilantism. If too many people complain about you being a jackass, you get your picture in the local paper/news website as the Jerk of the Week.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I just don't understand why this can't be fixed. Why does ISP's let this happen? Why do people let this happen?
This is just so utterly ridiculous to me that it actually makes me sick to think about it. The shear amount of waste being dealt is just insane. And it's not just Email, it's regular postal mail too. The US Mail System is so clogged up with junk that it amazes me that my paycheck gets to me each month. Every single day my mail box is full of, basically, junk that goes straight into the fire.
The above is not worth reading.
Find IP and shut it down.
This is the problem with decentralized control.
Isp's are part to blame.
First, let me say that I hate spam. I understand that in most cases it's annoying. I also understand that in most cases it's sent via illegal access to unwitting people's computers, and that there is no doubt a real cost associated with the amount of bandwidth that it consumes. I understand that in most cases the products that it advertises are scams.
But I have to wonder, how does that statistic that 92.3% of all email sent is spam relate to the rate of junk mail sent via snail mail? I don't know about you, but I'd say that 90% or more of the mail that comes to my home is junk mail, so I'm not sure that the spam statistic is all that surprising. This may just be the expected signal/noise ratio.
Is anyone out there running a tarpit?
I have the ability to turn my mail server into a tarpit, but it won't do much good unless there are a lot of other tarpits out there too.
...at least as far as compromised computers are concerned. Bill Gates claimed in 2004 that spam would be solved by 2006. He could go a long way towards making that happen by offering XP SP2 (upgrade) free to anyone who wants it, that would work on any computer running Win95 or newer, legal/legit or not. Sure, he's officially retired, but I bet people in Redmond still listen to him. Hell, he's got enough money, he could literally buy every single copy needed and M$ wouldn't even lose a penny. (Except for lost Vista sales.)
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