Slashdot Mirror
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'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.