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."

Comments

ntpdate time.spam.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it. I can sync my computer to it.

Ranking is unimportant

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Yet again we see ranking used in a silly way. It's the numbers that are important.

Third placed Turkey and tenth placed UK are wthin a +- 6% band, probably close to the margin of error in the analysis.

I dont get it...

[repapetilto]

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?

Re:I dont get it...

[chromatic]

Am I missing something here?

Yes; it takes plenty of processor time, electricity, memory, bandwidth, and administrator time to make sure that you don't get spam. Also, not everyone uses e-mail the same way you do. Some of us actually want to hear from people we don't know.

Re:I dont get it...

[kylehase]

Even if you only give your private address to your friends, you must have smart friends who NEVER:

• Included you on a To: or CC: list of recipients,
• Used your email address to search for you on social sites,
• Sent you e-cards/e-invites

That's pretty amazing. I'm sure most of the spam in my "friends only" or "business only" email accounts were not leaked by me but by a trusted party who didn't know better.

Re:I dont get it...

[jimicus]

i think all these anti-spam ideas miss the big picture: if no one bought products from spam, they wouldnt do it. we should be going after the idiots who reply to spam.

IIRC there was someone who tried an experiment some time ago. They tried to buy some of the v1|4|g|r|4 that they'd seen advertised in spam.

They couldn't find a single spam which actually led to someone genuinely trying to sell something. I think they concluded that spam had mostly become a pyramid scheme, with a handful of people at the top trying (with some success) to persuade everyone below that they could make lots of money from spam - all they needed to do was buy this mailing list software and that list of email addresses...

Re:I hate spam...

[zappepcs]

If spam gives you a pain in the balls, you are eating it wrong.

Wait a minute

[relikx]

I thought Turkey was a Muslim country, isn't spam some sort of shoulder meat? Oh right, they're secular.

Re:Wait a minute

[EdIII]

isn't spam some sort of shoulder meat ?

I think you may have answered your own question there :) LOL

Officially, S.P.A.M originally stood for "Shoulder of Pork And haM". However, it most often referred to as "Something Posing As Meat" and "Spare Parts Animal Meat."

There are also, completely unsubstantiated of course, rumors that old man Hormel himself thought he was going to hell for his part in creating it...

A Rate Comparision

[pyrrhonist]

Just to give some idea of the scale, this is more than twice the rate at which the human male thinks about sex.

I didn't think it was possible.

Was anyone surprised here?

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

You think it's bad now, wait until the spammers can faceboogle you.

ASSP is the answer

[Lershac]

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/

Re:Won't sombody think of the children?

[1u3hr]

My idea is that if x% of the traffic coming out of a country is abusive then those controlling..., then 100% of that traffic will just be bit-bucketted at the gateways

If you block a country because it is relaying spam, it will be switched to go via another country before the week is out. Meanwhile millions of innocent people will find themselves cut off.

Specifically, if required, then the U.S. of A. should be subject to these same rules.

You bet. Clean up your own act first. I'm not holding my breath. Easier to blame nasty foreigners.

Did you RTFA:

The US continues to relay far more spam than any other country,

And see the ROKSO list, note the nationalities.

I live in Hong Kong. About 80% of the spam I get is from the US. And yet I find my emails often bounced from US addresses because of similar enlightened attitudes.

Most of the world's spam ORIGINATES in the USA, is PAID FOR by USA companies. Your government does nothing to stop it. (What is it, two or three prosecutions in the last 5 years?) American companies lobby to prevent any effective measures to stop spam. Bit bucket Florida and you might make a dent in it for a while. But attack the source, not the routing.