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71% of Spam Servers are Located in China
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu May 20, 2004 02:10 PM
from the why-can't-that-wall-work-both-ways dept.
from the why-can't-that-wall-work-both-ways dept.
aspelling writes "
We all know that majority of consumer electronics and other goods sold
in US stores is produced in China. But China specialty extends beyond
consumer electronics, clothes and automotive components. According to Commtouch Software research 71%
of all spam servers are located in this People Republic. "Since Jan. 1,
we've seen probably a 30% to 40% increase" in spam traffic" Commtouch
CEO says. BusinessWeek reports
about this issue."
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71% of Spam Servers are Located in China
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Obligitory.... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Sunday July 06 2003, @01:45AM)
Re:Obligitory.... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://shortcircuit.us/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @02:01AM)
How Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel | Last Journal: Saturday April 15 2006, @12:27PM)
They don't really care that much about what the outside world can read about China, as long as that information doesn't get back into the country.
Obligitory Spam, the food product, link.... (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday November 03 2006, @03:51PM)
(Funny on slashdot how I have to qualify Spam as a food product...)
Re:Obligitory Spam, the food product, link.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That might be because the food product is properly called SPAM. (Follow your own links!)
Re:Taiwan (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 12 2006, @07:08PM)
Does the story differentiate between the two?
Re:Taiwan (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday March 28 2005, @11:39AM)
Re:Taiwan (Score:4, Insightful)
They are talking about the Peoples Republic (of China), captial Beijing, "China is notorious for its Internet censorship efforts".
This doesn't sound like they are talking about Taiwan/Republic of China, (provisional) capital Taipei.
Avoid the Noid, he ruins web experiences (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Sunday January 08 2006, @04:07PM)
Go to the press release [commtouch.com] (it is listed on the page) and click on the link for the white paper
But surprise, surprise, the "best solution" is the one they sell, but it's still an interesting read.
Re:Avoid the Noid, he ruins web experiences (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe it is in the subtle difference of spam messages sent, and servers used to send them.
Use blacklists... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.grub.net/blog/index.html | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @08:48AM)
If you don't know anyone in China (or Asia) you can use a blacklist for the whole region. My firewall with OpenBSD's awesome spamd [openbsd.org] autoupdates its tarpit blacklists every couple of hours. One good list for Asian IPs is here. [okean.com]
I love the idea of tarpitting, seeing spammers connections being tied up for ~3300 seconds (my highest) warms my heart. If more people did it that'd mean less overall spam traffic.
Re:Use blacklists... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.dpk.net/ | Last Journal: Friday February 11 2005, @12:22PM)
here are proves: (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.speznas.de/)
Re:Use blacklists... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.grub.net/blog/index.html | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @08:48AM)
Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.edbateman.com/)
Tarpitting discourages spamming without permanently blocking an offending IP address. Tarpitting works by monitoring traffic and applying sluggish responses to remote IPs showing spam-like behavior. For example, if an IP sends too many messages to users during an email session, tarpitting starts slowing MDaemon's response. If the spam-like behavior includes excessive unknown addresses during a session, the remote server can be suspended from access for a user-specified amount of time.
Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://iambitter.org/)
It's like buying Lucky Charms cereal, then filtering out all the marshmallows and throwing them in the garbage because they're not healthy. Very true, but if that's how you feel, why bother buying Lucky Charms?
Surely it would be more effective to implement challenge-response, or simply boycott email in favour of IM or a secure messageboard/contact form, or whatever you prefer. The problem is with email, not with Asia.
Besides, I think this study is bogus. All the studies I've previously seen pointed squarely at the USA as the primary source of spam. Empirical evidence from my own email box bears this out. Most of the spam I receive tends to come from residential cable modem/DSL lines in various countries, predominantly the states. I suspect that these are either virus-hijacked boxes, or people being paid to send spam through their home connection (ie, the ads placed on telephone polls: "Have an internet connection at home? Make up to $4,000/month with no effort required! Call now!")
Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.gh-sts.com/HOWTO | Last Journal: Tuesday November 01 2005, @09:39PM)
Except, it's more like buying a box of lucky charms expecting to find marshmallows and the regular oats (or whatever it is) cereal and finding a bunch of dirty needles in it as well. SPAM is not supposed to be a part of the web. It's an unwelcome, criminal blight on it and it's being perpetrated by people who are actively trying to ruin a good thing for everyone else. I find it perfectly acceptable that these people be relegated to their own corner and thrown off the web.
That's fine (Score:4, Informative)
It also could work to help force people to get their shit straight. Many ISPs (domestic and foriegn) are just non-responsive to SPAM/hacking complaints. One proven tactic that works is the threat of mass bans. Between a proposed UPD and a ban by the members of Nanog, UUNET was convinced to become more responsive to complains of network abuse.
The Internet does not have a police force so the community polices itself. If a group won't play by the rules, they shouldn't be supprised to find themselves excluded from a large part of it.
Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://mysticode.com/)
The Great (fire)Wall of China (Score:5, Insightful)
Great (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Yet another IT service being outsourced overseas........
Write your congressperson and demand that SPAM jobs be kept at home!
blacklist the netblocks? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.valleytechnologiesllc.com/)
First question is what netblocks can I block to effectivley ban all of china?
Re:blacklist the netblocks? (Score:5, Informative)
That's the thing... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.celsius1414.com/)
Re:So why not blackhole the entire country? (Score:4, Interesting)
But I can say that of 3413 spam messages I received only 185 of them came from China.
Old Joke (Score:4, Funny)
remember what Russia used to say (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
blackholes (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday January 03 2003, @03:39PM)
Re:Word to that... (Score:4, Insightful)
>Not everyone can run their own email servers. What about my mom or grandmother
Why don't you give them e-mail accounts on your domain and they'll get spam-free e-mail.
Why block China? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday June 29 2005, @09:39PM)
Re:Why block China? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday November 26, @06:00PM)
I face a *huge* spam problem, mostly from .ru, and dumping everything from that domain makes an enormous difference.
But most of my email... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://127.0.0.1/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 15 2006, @03:30AM)
Grump
That's funny because... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday June 18 2004, @11:45AM)
Where are the banks? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.animats.com)
Another source (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.udviklingschef.dk/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 18 2004, @02:52PM)
Besides - who cares where the exploited servers are? Soon (my guess is - less than 6 months) the majority of spams will be sent via zombies taken over by some worm or virus. These computers will be spread all over the world. The only solution is to nip it in the butt. Make spam illegal (as it is in Europe) and sue the pants of the spammers. Enough of those stupid atempts [slashdot.org] to pretend something is being done. We all know that the spammers are from Gods own country - hijacking machines whereever it's easiest.
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
At least according to my own experience, and according to research conducted outside of america..
I don't believe for a minute that the spammers are actually chinese.. You can recognize the writing of a typical american "internet entrepeneur" in most spam mail..
And the servers? Sure, but most spam servers are innocent infected computers anyway...and if you look at the number of american computers in the world compared to the number of asian numbers..it would surprize me if the majority of servers aren't american..
I have never seen a single spam email with chinese letters..why?
Don't jump so quickly on the Chinese (Score:5, Insightful)
Its a small business (Score:4, Informative)
This accurately mirrors what I've noted, I run the mail sweeper for a medium-sized enterprise and analyse spam to improve the quality of our filtering.
I note a lot of the spam has similar formats (apart from the 419 scammers, but they're easy to filter out), leading me to suggest that spamming is dominated by a relatively small clique of big-time mailers
This does at least make it easier to write rules to stop it. We don't use Bayesian filtering, a human-monitored system can be more efficient if done right.
just say NO (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:just say NO (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.hyperbooks.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 15 2005, @06:13PM)
Implementing it by mailbox would be up to your ISP. The tools they need are readily available.
ahhh...so clear now... (Score:5, Funny)
How nice of them to block-list my ISP then! (Score:3, Funny)
We are switching ISPs anyway, so I am not terribly concerned, I just think this is wildly hypocritical.
RTFA! (Score:5, Informative)
It said that 71% of the URLs in spam go to web servers in China, not that 71% of spam comes from China!
The vast majority of spam that hits my mail server comes from the US (comcast, rr.com, etc) machines that have been compromised.
Tools like bigevil.cf (SpamAssassin plugin) help me to filter those spams with Chinese URLs.
What's really happening out there ... (Score:4, Insightful)
There're just too many clueless email admins over there. They lack the skills of configuring a well behaved MTA (it's a pretty tough job these days indeed), and the language barrier is just making things worse. Most of the people are just configuring their mail servers according to howto-like articles written by some clueful guys, and those articles are mostly just laying out the steps, no how and why things should work that way. If you hop to any of the tech forums' email section, you'll find it's full of questions like:
"Help, I just configured my email server according to XXX but things didn't work out
"Help, why my smtp auth doesn't work? It'll accept any username/password
"Help, why I can send out email by can't receive?"
"Help, I got blacklisted by XXX, how can I get myself out?"
etc., etc.
So, it's a matter of educating them how to do things right. As a Chinese myself, I am trying hard to help out those poor guys by answering questions on those forums, and by helping them out translating the documentations to Chinese.
So please, don't shut the door to them, they just need to be educated.
Cut Spam: Block the APNIC IP's to your mailserver (Score:3, Insightful)
Relevant portion of the file at iana.org:
The products/services are mostly from the U.S. (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Do you sell the penis pills advertised? Yeah? Did you request the advertisement? SLAM!
Forget about blocking all of China. I feel safe in the belief that it wouldn't stop the spam at all.
Spam not the only Chinese problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Ultimately, I think we'll need smarter spam filters. That isn't too different than what we were doing at HNC. IF the letter is from someone you don't know and talks about Human growth hormone or altering of bodily parts, it is a pretty good bet it is spam. It is really just a matter of good pattern recognition.
Willing participants or innocent victims? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://baheyeldin.com/)
However, there is differentiator that needs to be made here: how many of these servers are actually run by spammers, vs. how many are hijacked by spammers without the owners' consent?
Isn't this an over generalization that demonizes entire people like: "All Arabs hate us!" or "All terrorists are Muslims!" or "All Jews are evil!"?
Another point is a differentiation between the people and the government. What the government does is not necessarily the same as what the people want or like.
Think about how G. W. Bush is behaving abroad (in your name) and even domestically, and ask yourself do you want everything he does to be actually in your name.