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US No Longer Leading the World In Spam
darthcamaro writes "America is no longer the spam king. According to Cisco, US-originated spam dropped by over two trillion messages — American-based IP addresses sent about 6.2 trillion spam messages. The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages. 'I'm not completely surprised to see US falling to number two in the spam stats, but I didn't expect it to happen yet,' said Cisco Fellow Patrick Peterson. 'I was really gratified to see the actual spam volume decrease, not just ranking, but we [also] decreased the amount of spam that is pouring out of the United States.'" The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP.
Couldn't "they" send TCP packets to target servers under the guise of having been sent from spambots?
Lots of alleged NSA affiliated IPs seem to be associated with ad/spam delivery:
http://cryptome.org/0001/nsa-ip-update14.htm
http://cryptome.org/0001/nsa-l3-peers.htm
Just askin'....
From what I understand - reading the blogs by WSJ and others behind the takedown of McColo - it wasn't just a matter of taking out McColo; but also discovering all the domains that the botnets were checking for and getting ahead of it to shut them down. And it was far more than just a few days - it was about a month or so before anything really picked up again - and my spam folder went from 100+/per day to ~8/day.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Following the money will lead you to a money transfer mule, then to a Western Union or Moneygram branch, and then the trail runs cold.
You could clamp down on money transfer services, but that will affect legitimate users of those services - people sending money to family members in other countries, perhaps in an emergency situation; and anyway, the criminals would just go to another method of cashing out, like for example the purchasing and forwarding agent scam.