Slashdot Mirror
The Internet's Bad Neighborhoods
An anonymous reader writes "Of the 42,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) surveyed, just 20 were found to be responsible for nearly half of all the spamming IP addresses — and some ISPs have more than 60% of compromised hosts, mostly in Asia. Phishing Bad Neighborhoods, on the other hand, are mostly in the U.S. Also, there is a silent ticking 'spam' bomb in BRIC countries: if India would have the same Internet penetration rate as the United States while keeping its current ratio of malicious IP addresses, we would observe 200% more spamming IP addresses worldwide. These are just few of the striking results of an extensive study from the University of Twente, in The Netherlands, which scrutinizes the Internet Bad Neighborhoods to develop next-generation algorithms and solutions to better secure networks."
Those aren't the phishers you're really worried about. There seem to be about ten "usual suspects" we keep seeing on our phishing reports. The low-end ones are trolling for Habbo Hotel accounts. A few notches up are phony logins for bank accounts (PayPal and HSBC are popular targets. New this week: Swedish tax refunds. And, for some reason, several new phish sites for AOL 9.0 accounts.) We track these, but they're more of a nuisance than a real threat.
The ones to worry about are better targeted and are of better quality. Those are aimed at corporate login info. Those won't be seen by broad-based phishing detection services because they're only sent to people who might have those logins. So they tend not to be blacklisted.
Brazil: 196,655,014 people (World Bank)
Russia: 141,930,000 people
India: 1,241,491,960 people
China: 1,344,130,000 people
that's 2,924,206,974 people total.
world population: 6,973,738,433 people, so BRIC countries are 41% of the total in population.
FTFA:
Of the 42,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) surveyed, just 20 were found to be responsible for nearly half of all the internet addresses that send spam.
so I take it "nearly half" is between 40% and 50%, but less than 50%. If it's over 41%, then what we are looking here is some form of distribution of 'nuisance' that is related to the actual population and it probably shows normal distribution.
Is this really a surprise?
You can't handle the truth.
Most of us don't work in datacenters.
I think this could easily become a huge issue. We are lucky that most phishing emails are of a very low standard and it's easy to spot the fakes.
I'm guessing that these developing countries don't take cyber crime to seriously at the moment, perhaps instead of governments pushing SOPA and and ACTA they could come up with agreements which will encourage BRIC nations to start cracking down on spammers before the problem gets out of hand.