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The US Continues Its Reign As King of Spam
An anonymous reader writes "The United States continues its reign as the king of spam, relaying more than 13% of global spam, accounting for hundreds of millions of junk messages every day, according to a report by Sophos. However, most dramatically, China – often blamed for cybercrime by other countries – has disappeared from the 'dirty dozen,' coming in at 15th place with responsibility for relaying just 1.9% of the world's spam."
I know two ways that most of this spam can be reduced so the US doesn't remain #1 here, but it takes a clued system administrator to do so.
#1: Block outgoing port 25 at the routers other than for the ISP's official mail server, and for clients who have signed a form taking full responsibility for their mail servers, and that any spam originating from them will come back onto their heads, not the ISP's.
#2: Sane mass mail rules on the mail server. Of course, this doesn't apply to mailing lists, but in general, an average Joe won't be sending thousands of MAIL TOs, nor sending out a 10,000 person bcc mail.
I don't think the problem is ISPs with open relays like which was the issue in years past, but private companies who have PHBs running the place that have no interest in spending for even the basics in security. I personally have encountered a lot of SMB owners who have told me, "Security has no ROI, so I am not interested in wasting my money on it" when presented with a proposal for even just the basics of network security such as outgoing spam filters on the company's Exchange server. They believe that they can call Geek Squad (or some random computer consulting firm that has the most TV ads) to fix anything if they find a problem. Of course, this means that when (not if) the business gets compromised, spambots can end up on numerous machines, and remain there indefinitely until the Windows Malicious Software Removal tool gets run on a patch day (assuming they even bother turning on Windows Update/Microsoft Update), company data gets destroyed, their ISP cuts their access off for TOS violations, or they find their IP range in a blackhole list and all their E-mail bounces.
It's not that the king spammers are in the US, it's that the US has the most machines permanently connected to the internet and infected by spambots. The whole statistics is a bit skewed because spam is one of those crimes where the one executing it is not necessarily also the one wanting to do it.
Just because the machine sending the spam is in the US doesn't mean the one wanting to send the spam is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm an "old-timer" in a variety of meanings despite my ID, and I know about Cantor and Siegel. Nevertheless, Terry asks the right question and points out how uninformative this article is.
The article reports that 13% of hosts "relaying spam" reside in the US. But what should we compare that 13% to? According to the figures in the CIA Factbook, some 57% of worldwide Internet hosts are located in the US. So I'd say the article's entire premise is flawed. If the conditional probability of a host spamming were equivalent world-wide then, using the Factbook's figures, US hosts should account for 57% of spam relays, not 13%.
On top of that, relaying tells us nothing about how spamming works. Spam doesn't come from computers; it starts as some back-alley deal and spreads relentlessly across the globe. Those zombied machines with the ISO country-code domains we all see pummeling our servers aren't the source of the spam either. They're just drones that take their orders from masters far away.
As Woodward and Bernstein were told, "follow the money." Looking at distributions of Internet hosts tells us nothing about the business of spamming or its effects.
We're #1, we're #1. YEAH! Go USA! :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).