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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.
According to Hormel
More than 122 million cans of the SPAM® family of products are sold worldwide each year, 90 million in the U.S. alone.
Sounds to me like the US is still the leader!
Clearly, this shows that the oft-suggested tactic of countering spam with fines, kidnapping, prison, and murder, is working extremely well. Just look at how we are no longer the top country for spam to originate from!
Except that of course it is well known that most spam is pumped out of botnets. And the botnets are usually spread out all over the world. Really, this just tells us that less spamming botnet activity is coming from the US than Brazil in that particular observed time frame. This could be attributed to any of a number of factors.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I thought it was bad enough when the U. S. was falling behind the rest of the world in health care and science education. Now we've fallen behind in spam generation as well?!?! Come on people! This is a wake-up call if ever I heard one!
We're #2! We're #2! We're #2!
In so many ways.
It's in FAQ
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I had no idea Brazil used Cyrillic character set.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
"The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP"
Oh, really?
According to the very links kdawson uses to back this idea up, the botnet was off line for what, maybe 2 weeks... out of a 52 week year. So if they accoutned for all of the US spam, that outage would result in a drop of 4%.
But looking at the other numbers in TFS, it looks like there was in fact a drop of something like 25%.
So yes, it may have had something to do with it. In the same sense that the increase in temperature in my house may have had something to do with letting the dog back in (but probably had more to do with having the furnace repaired).
I guess everyone in the US has their preferred dealers for Viagra and Swiss watches now. The market is too saturated!
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
This could serve as an inspiration to some movie script writer-
In a world where.....One man set out to generate enough spam to make his country proud. This is the story of courage, and determination...
You get the gist?
Face your daemons!
I always figure when I get 15 mod points, it's slashdot's way of telling me to stop posting and start reading.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages.
From now on, 7.7 trillion will be known as one Brazilian.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What I'd like to see is statistics on where the spam-producing criminals are, and where are their "customers", rather than counting where the botnet is
That may be a more difficult question than you might expect. Finding the person who is writing the spam and sending instructions to the botnet to send the spam is one thing, but it isn't the only thing. As we have seen before, there are plenty more spammers available to take the place of any who might fall from the top.
The customers, however are another thing entirely. While many of our favorite spammers may be in a few select locations, their customers are generally distributed all over the world - or so we would believe from the WHOIS data. Unfortunately, there isn't generally much better records for the customers than the WHOIS data for the domains that are being spamvertised. And we know that the WHOIS data is itself generally questionable on a good day and utter crap any other day. Of course you could also trace the IP address of the webserver for the spamvertised domain, but that will only lead to to where the site is hosted, which doesn't tell you where the "company" actually is.
I bet Brazilians, Russians or Chinese aren't doing that much good business in selling Viagra (may contain plaster) or Genuine Quartz Rolexes, or more importantly, buying them
As I said earlier, those classifiers depend on who you are trying to describe. I can tell you from my experience that a significant portion of the spam I receive is spamvertising domains registered in Russia or China. And there are often other servers along the way to keep the operation going that are distributed in various places in Pacific Ocean countries, Africa, or South America. Although of course since the registrars are generally in on the deal, they are intentionally posting garbage WHOIS records for the domains in question.
IMHO: if you eliminated the spam that either comes from American criminals
Again that comes down to how you classify the criminals. Spamming is generally an international endeavor now, though.
or which is targeted at Americans, there'd be no spam
I think an argument could be made that not much spam anymore really targets any particular country. I would say that a primary reason why so much spam is written in English is just because it is one of the most read languages on the internet; hence a spam in English has a very good chance of getting to someone who can read English. When Mandarin or Hindi take over we'll see more spam in those languages (I have seen Chinese and Japanese spam for years in some of my inboxes).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I was self-appointed anti-spam czar at my last job, as I was absolutely convinced that nearly all our CPU criticals in Nagios were i/o bound, and that they were largely caused by spam. One time, I took a server (a dell 2950) down from a load of 15 to a load of 3, just by blocking one IP address I found connected to SMTP 6 times, and causing spamd to churn, according to the Exim logs. The majority of the spam that I saw would come from Brazil, Columbia and Italy. One time, we hit a flood so bad of Brazilian spam, that it maxed out SMTP connections on half our west coast shared hosting servers, and caused one of our caching nameservers to crash from all the rbl look-ups.
I can't really say I'm surprised by this at all.
...slashdot's way of telling me to stop posting and start reading.
It's views like that that have ruined slashdot. The day that I am discouraged from participating in off-topic flamewars and trolling with copypasta, all the while wielding my stash of mod points like a righteous crowbar of indignation, is the day I lose hope in all that is right in the world!!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.