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The US Continues Its Reign As King of Spam

Posted by samzenpus on from the winning-isn't-everything dept.

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."

9 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Less spam on the weekend by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I see about a 40% variation in spam during the week. The minimum seems to be Monday morning for me, which is Sunday night in the US. I definitely get the impression that it drops off when work computers are shut down for the weekend.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
    1. Re:Less spam on the weekend by V+for+Vendetta · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It depends at which kind of spam you're looking at. And in these days we should perhaps start to distinguish the different types.

      If talking about the "classic spam" aka email spam, then yes, I agree with your observation.

      However, (forum) comment spam in our case (Germany) stems mostly from IP address blocks allocated to Russia and former-USSR countries (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Latvia etc.) and China. I would guesstimate those two make up of 80% of the spam attempts. Very few comment spam attempts stem from IPs allocated to U.S. providers, so the U.S. is at least for us not "King of spam" there. The remaining 20% are equally shared between North America, Europium and African IP addresses. Of the top of my head, I can't remember comment spam from South America or Australia/New Zealand.

  2. Good filters have hidden the problem by beakerMeep · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Good spam filters like Gmail's and other have really hidden the problem from public view. People seem to much more freely post their email adresses in forums nowadays with little to no fear of it being harvested. Of course it does get harvested, but they dont care as they don't see it. I guess that's not such a bad thing though, but it's still a strain on the internet as a whole I would think. I wonder what the data size numbers look like rather than % of messages by country. Anyways, my point is just that I wonder if there will be little to no effort going forward from government types or PHB's who don't wanna spend the money for something that doesn't seem to be a problem.

    --
    meep
    1. Re:Good filters have hidden the problem by maxume · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hence the theory that most spammers make their money by selling spam services, not by selling whatever the spam is advertising.

      I guess a better way to phrase that is to say that the people paying to send the spam are the marks, not the people receiving the spam.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  3. The real question is... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The real question is, relaying it FROM where?

    Sure, the U.S. has a lot of mail servers online compared to other countries. That stands to reason, given that the Internet was invented here, SMTP was invented here, email was invented here. Usenet was invented here. AOL was invented here. And SPAM was invented when AOL connected to Usenet.

    Where is the SPAM originating? Is it originating from the U.S. as well? Most of the SPAM I see is Russian or Chinese in origin, with a small fraction of it actually coming from the U.S. itself. I get more SPAM that originates from Nigerian scammers, in fact, than I do from U.S. hosts. Most of the viagra and pharmaceutical SPAM I get is from Europe or from India, where it's legal to sell the drugs in question without a prescription and ship them internationally.

    This article seems to be about blaming the relays, rather than the origin of the SPAM in the first place, and the U.S. is getting caught out because it has more mail servers, or more Windows machines on the net, and these are being exploited to relay the SPAM, rather than SPAM being a predominantly U.S. problem.

    P.S.: I'm not arguing against blacklisting open relays; I still think that's part of the answer

    -- Terry

    1. Re:The real question is... by Njovich · · Score: 2, Interesting

      According to the figures in the CIA Factbook [cia.gov], some 57% of worldwide Internet hosts are located in the US.

      These numbers look completely bogus to me. How on earth is South Korea listed at 301,270 hosts in 2009? This number should be much higher. And this is just checking the best connected country on the planet. Many of the other Asian and European numbers seem to be low estimates too.

      Of course, it could be that they use some definition of 'internet host' that I wasn't previously aware of.

  4. Re:Surprise, surprise. Wait, maybe not so much. by Opportunist · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Last I checked the controlling stations are mostly in Turkey, Malaysia and Ukraine. I'm not entirly sure why, but I guess it's easier to keep control servers online in countries where the police has better things to do than to hunt down criminals that don't affect the local economy... or at least not in a harmful way.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  5. FYI: A note on capitalizing SPAM... by tlambert · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FYI: A note on capitalizing SPAM...

    The reason it was called SPAM on Usenet in the first place was as an acronym for "Shit Parading As Meat". You capitalize in order to indicate that it's an acronym.

    -- Terry

  6. Re:Hi by 1s44c · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    You are quite right. I get loads of SMTP connections from the US but xen.spamhaus filters out almost all of it. The spam that gets though tends to come from servers in south america, the middle east, and sometimes china. I'm wondering if the only reason for that is because spamhaus is better at mapping home IP ranges for the western world.

    It's really sad that I have to drop mail connections from non-business IP space. Windows on broadband is a curse.