Slashdot Mirror
China Cleans Up Spam Problem
angry tapir writes "It's been a few years coming, but it looks like China may finally be getting a handle on its spam problem. Once the largest source of the world's spam, China has been gradually fading off the list of the world's top spam-producers. Right now Cisco Systems' IronPort group ranks it at number 18 in terms of spam-producing countries. That's a big drop from two years ago, when it consistently ranked in the top five."
It's not like they didn't have the existing hardware and infrastructure for a huge firewall or something.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I feel like a old slashdot article from last year (yes somehow that's old) claimed that most spam came from the states. I couldn't find the article but I did find this after googling it: http://www.infoniac.com/hi-tech/most-of-spam-comes-from-the-usa-says-sophoslabs.html
They're just discovering outsourcing.
People still use email? Or are they talking about usenet spam, which unfortunately still blasts out? Hold on while I check my gopher server.
From talking to "non techies" email is pretty near dead outside the corporate world. Person to person text is now conducted exclusively via SMS or facebook wall postings. Personal to business transactions (site registrations, etc) are done with gmail and email is otherwise not used anymore.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I don't know where they are getting their sources but their listed references say nothing about chinas ranking. See
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso
China is still number 2.
I knew that seeding the word-salad text databases used by the spammers with strings like "harmonious Falun Gong", "Independent Taiwan", and "h4rb/\L Tiananmen Square" would pay off one day!
China has more Internet users than any other nation (420 million), so being down at number 18 for spam seems quite good.
Is it a coincidence that google "loses" 150.000 GMail accounts, and suddenly China cleans up it's spam problem?
I apologize for raining on your 2.0 parade, but "person to person text is" not conducted exclusively via SMS or facebook. Is SMS/facebook/twitter/etc. starting to eclipse email? sure.
But until I can readily and cheaply setup my own Facebook wall server on a Linux box in my closet, email is NOT dead. That which you speak utilizes closed protocols to communicate (exception is SMS). They're reliant on the companies they operate on... email protocols have been around since the dawn of the internet and are available for everyone, because their industry standards
Email is far from dead as far as I've seen, even for non-techies. It is not the essential tool it was 5 years ago, but it has become just another tool in the everyman's communications toolbox.
SMS can't be used for more than quick updates or "hiya" conversations. And not everyone is on Facebook/twitter, or wants to be even in the non-techie real world!
And many elderly who have been on the web are more apt to keep up to date on email, than Facebook/etc. Trying to get granny onto email is tough, but trying to get her to keep up with her facebook-savvy grandsons (or to accept an friend request, for that matter) is a tougher task.
Email is falling fast from the thrown of the "only digital communication tool", and becoming just one of many tools. And many people will still keep it as their dominant form of communications simply because they don't need the "latest/greatest" communications tool.
Search for cisco global threat report pdf.
Most spam is sent out by botnets anyways, which of course have compromised PCs from all over the world contributing to them. China cleaned up a few (million) boxes, but other 2nd and 3rd world countries have been coming online in larger numbers to make up for the loss.
In the end, its all for naught, however. As long as the spammers can make money sending out spam, they will find a way to do it. We can play international whac-a-mole with security and filtering settings but the spammers will continue to find ways around it because it is what they are paid for.
The only people who are genuinely making a difference in the fight against spam are the ones who actively work to disconnect the spammers from their revenue streams; everyone else is either contributing to the problem or armchair quarterbacking.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's really annoying. ISPs like Comcast forbid you from running any types of servers in the TOS, but don't even bother to block outbound port 25 connections. It's the worst of both worlds; legitimate server operators are banned, but they won't raise a finger to stop botnet spamming originating on their networks.
All they would have to to do is block port 25 by default, and say "call us" if you need to run a server. Spam would drop drop dramatically, and home servers would be possible.
Our stats show China at #8. The top 10 for us are:
The last three are all 1.3% because of rounding, but the order really is China - Vietnam - Poland.
OK, not to cast this accomplishment in a bad light; but I wish rankings weren't used so often for this kind of thing.
The trouble with ranks is that everybody could be really close to the same number, and the rankings are just statistical noise.
Somebody else posted the percentage list upon which the rankings are based. That's better, but you still have to consider the number of hosts. A country with a small number of hosts could rank really low, and still have a large percentage of spambots.
China is a huge country, but I'm not sure how many hosts it has. The US may have more, but I doubt that's enough to justify our huge percentage of spams.
IMHO, the USA antispam people and the people that publish these rankings both have work to do.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've never had spam from China before, but in the last few months it keeps getting through all the filters of the Web hosting company I use.
Never have I had so much spam, and it always begins with "We are a China-based..." It should be easy enough to filter that, no?
China isn't even on the list for the last 30 days:
#1 India (18.3%)
#2 Brazil (9.5%)
#3 Russia (7.0%)
#4 Ukraine (5.1%)
#5 Vietnam (3.9%)
#6 Italy (3.3%)
#7 Germany (3.1%)
#8 Thailand (2.8%)
#9 Kazakhstan (2.5%)
#10 Romania (2.5%)
#11 Colombia (2.5%)
#12 Argentina (2.3%)
#13 Indonesia (2.3%)
#14 South Korea (2.2%)
#15 Taiwan (2.0%)
#16 United States (1.9%)
#17 Great Britain (1.9%)
#18 Poland (1.8%)
#19 Morocco (1.7%)
#20 Pakistan (1.6%)
#21 Peru (1.5%)
#22 Spain (1.4%)
#23 Israel (1.4%)
#24 Saudi Arabia (1.4%)
#25 Chile (1.3%)
Source. (Click "top 25", then select "last 30 days".)
For all time, the top 5 are:
#1 China (10.1%)
#2 Brazil (8.9%)
#3 United States (7.4%)
#4 Germany (6.5%)
#5 Russia (6.0%)
perhaps the spam volume has not decreased from china, only that volume has increased from other regions.
Down to #18, SHOW THEM!!! We need to retain our leadership in something, eh? Perhaps, we can offer bulk mail rates for spammers, like the USPS. BTW, I noticed that the Chinese are a little on the lite side, weight-wise, when compared to our corn-fed-beef-fed Americans. There may be more of them, but as a whole we probably outweigh them. And did I mention that we have a better Super Bowl? Now, don't even get me started about NASCAR . . .
Speaking as a China Mobile customer for some years...I used to get 2-5 SMS spam per day. This has dropped to zero for the last six months or so. Actually, today, I got a spam and was surprised by it...and was surprised by the fact that I was surprised. A big advantage to an authoritarian government is that it can make decisions and then implement them. It makes messy representative government look shabby by comparison. The things you can get done when The Smart People are in charge...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
China still seems to be the number one source of bots searching for valid logins on my ssh servers though. Followed, for some odd reason, by Brazil.
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Too bad in China, "spam" worthy of blocking not only includes "want to get cheap pills / anatomical improvements?" emails, but also "want to go protest government policy?" emails. Not sure I like the government getting better at blocking the former if it is a byproduct of attempts to more effectively block the latter.
Most SPAM I am seeing at the moment is coming from Hotmail & Yahoo mail servers. The makes me wonder if their captcha has been hacked.
Long ago made a list of IP blocks that were spamming my servers. China was tops. I blocked the IP addresses in China, and similar places. Cut the spam problem dramatically. Frankly they have little to offer.
We all know that 80% of global spam are sent by botnets. So the most effective way to reduce spam is to detect botnets, and clean up those malware-infected computers. That is exactly what China has been doing since 2009.
China government put two orders, "Notification Guidelines for Internet Security Incidents" and "Detection and Response Mechanism against Trojans and Botnets", into effect in June 2009. This builds the framework for all stakeholders to work together to track and dismantle botnets. The spam reduction we see today is just a by-product of their botnet mitigation effort.
While China is still high in my daily botnet chart, botnets within China has decreased quite alot. Eliminating malware-infected computers is the sure way to cut spam.