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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 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
We're number one !!!!
U.S.A. !!!
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
Spam is a serious crime against humanity that has been with us for many decades
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
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
Not saying they are wrong, but I suspect a more accurate measure of the problem would require many more sources of data.
Since they rely on statistics generated from their products (not mentioned in TFA but I can't imagine where else they got their data from), there is an automatic bias introduced there.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I sent 2 terabytes of mail today
(Sold my soul right there)
It's the same old thing as yesterday
(Sold my soul right there)
I'm a black hat burning out a thousand bots
(Sold my soul right there)
Filtering's futile and I won't get caught....
chorus
They have blocked all your torrents, you can't even ping
They've been shaping your traffic into doughnut rings
But still they can't stop me 'cause of what I am
For now and forever I'm the King of Spa-am
King of Spam
I'll always be
King of Spam....
...With apologies to the Police.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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 all all 30% off from yesterday.
There's laetrile, nona juice, and ephedrine for speed.
Just a Visa or Paypal creds are all you need.
My partner's in jail, my staff is on the lam.
We've got botnets with petabytes of hijacked RAM.
And our ISP doesn't give a tinker's dam,
'Cause of our reputation as the King of spam.
Don't miss out on our giant online porno sale.
(Is my scam out there?)
We told Grandma she opted in for our e-mail.
(Is my scam out there?)
We got lawyers to help preserve our corporate veil.
(Is my scam out there?)
We got bullshit and horseshit, we've got tons of fail.
(Is my scam out there?)
No doctor will want a medical exam,
Our chiropractor's part of the insurance scam,
Get some herbal viagra and become a man,
'Cos we're known in this world as the King of Spam.
If you're hawking Chinese knockoffs of Nike shoes, (Is your scam out there?)
Some 419 scams, offers they can't refuse, (Is your scam out there?)
With their credit card's keylogged, they can sing the blues, (Is your scam out there?)
We do fraud, we do larc'ny, anything you choose. (Is your scam out there?)
Well, AOL shut down Spamford with a slam,
Alan Ralsky got nailed bigtime by from Uncle Sam,
But the flood's even bigger than the Hoover Dam,
'Cause we're known the world over as the King of spam.
King of spam.
King of spam.
King of spam.
We'll always be King of spam.
We'll always be King of spam...
- With apologies to Weird Al Yankovic, and of course, The Police :)
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.
Not a shocker. According to an antivirus company, most spam comes from a place where people use Windows and are clueless about preventing infections. The zombie Windows machines are a big part of the problem, but the command & control systems seem to mainly be overseas. As are a lot of the products/scams being pitched.
What this says is that in the US users need to do a better job of securing their computers. And all around the world spammers need to be killed.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
e-mail to/from China works fine for me in Australia. Almost all of my spam comes from USA.
Using the logic I described above, computers located in China spam at about the norm for all computers worldwide. The article reports that 1.9% of relaying hosts are located in China; this is actually slightly better than China's overall share of computers worldwide, 2.1%. (For the US the figures are 13% and 57% respectively.)
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).
This is a surprise to me. That so much of the Spam is initiated here is disconcerting, because we should be able to do something about it. More needs to be done to tie the money stream to the spamming. If it is a particular affiliate stream then the pressure needs to be brought down on them to tighten things up or face consequences. Ultimately the problem with spam will only go away when people stop illogically being enticed into doing things because of it. Unfortunately spammers need such a small return on their mailing that it only takes a miniscule fraction of the population to fall for these mails to make it cost effective, I honestly would have thought at this point almost all spam originated outside the US, so like I said I found this a bit disturbing.
. . . is another man's ham. Both are dead pigs.
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
The "green card SPAM" is only the most famous early SPAM; if you want to be truly technical, Jordan Hubbard sent the first SPAM via a broadcast message to his /etc/hosts file on the very early net, though he wasn't advertising anything.
You can ask Jordan about this, he rather likes being the first 8-).
-- Terry
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.
Try greylisting. Anyone using a proper mailer will come through, >90% of spam (my experience) is stopped that way. And actually only mails from new, as yet unknown senders get delayed; friends or business associates you get mail from regularly get through without delay. And what comes through is mostly Nigerian scams, interestingly. Apparently they use proper mailers.
To me this has proven the best anti-spam measure so far. And by the time the spammers catch up it also means their cost of sending has gone up a lot as it is not "fire and forget" any more but real resources need to be allocated. So far they don't.
Agreed. greylisting is very effective. That and checking SBL/RBL et al go a LONG way to keeping things at a sane level.
If we can't fix it, we'll fix it so nobody else can!
I recently went through my email stats to see what IP's where sending email that was being rejected the most. I found only about 10 ip's in countries I have never had a reason to deal with composed about 70-80% of the waisted rejected email (thousands of emails each). I then either banned the country or the ip address. Not so much a solution, as saving some resources.
Living in Chile
Spam drops to a trickle on US national holidays like thanksgiving.
Fscking Yanks...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Good spam filters like Gmail's and other have really hidden the problem from public view
Except that the filters only end up increasing the cost of business. The filters take human time, CPU time, storage space, bandwidth, etc. Sure the end users see less spam in their inbox but at what cost?
Someone has to pay for the added expenses. And filtering will never solve the problem of spam itself; it only escalates the arms race as spammers find more ways to overcome filtering. We need to work on the root cause of spam if we ever want to defeat it.
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.
A lot of people don't realize or acknowledge how much money they already are spending. Many companies are paying for dedicated anti-spam hardware and/or software. And as more bandwidth is consumed by spam coming in - as filters don't stop spam until after it crosses in and reaches the mail server - companies will have to pay more for internet access as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I can not be bothered to go that far. Too much work. An incoming smtp takes maybe a couple hundred bytes over my 2 Mbit line, takes a couple thousand cycles of my 2 GHz or so processor, and adds a line in my log file. The effort I would have to put in to blacklist some IP (I'm surprised you get that many spamn from so few IPs in the first place) is simply not worth it.
Besides as I'm doing international business I don't want to black list a complete country.
Excuse me, but shouldn't that be Kingdom of Spam?
Nations shouldn't be treated as a person; they aren't corporations (yet).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The first impression I had when reading this post was:
"The United Kingdom continues its reign in SPAM"
Had it happened to someone else or am I becoming crazy?
Just because I use DNSBL's doesn't mean I don't use greylisting as well.
I've been doing greylisting for years and greet pause checks years before that. I don't much like abusing SMTP in such a fashion but as you point out it does work well.