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."

Comments

Less spam on the weekend

[MichaelSmith]

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.

The real question is...

[tlambert]

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

Re:The real question is...

[yuna49]

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.

King of Spam

[grcumb]

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.

With apologies to Weird Al Yankovic

[Tackhead]

There's a sale on quack medical drugs today.
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 :)