Spam from Taiwan

TristanGrimaux writes "According to a recent study done by CipherTrust, two thirds of the world's spam is sent by Taiwan servers. The US follows with 24% and in a distant third is China with only 3% of the servers who actually sends the spam." The article cites easy access to broadband and lack of crackdown on offenders as the main contributing factors.

Re:Whats specific about Taiwan? -- Outsourcing!

[ahodgkinson]

So, what is so specific about Taiwan that causes this?
Availability of relatively cheaper computing power with good bandwidth?
Some legal stuff?
Availability of some skill set?

All of the above, and more. Taiwan is a great place to outsource technology intensive operations. Perhaps spammers have discovered this. In a nutshell, spamming is just another technology driven business.

Maybe it's so great that even China outsources their spam generation there too. Hence their low spam generation figures.

Re:Survey Says?

[Firehed]

You don't do the business itself from the Caymans, just your under-the-radar finances.

Re:Survey Says?

[Mr Z]

Ok, I know you're trying to be clever with your "Content Restriction, Annulment and Protection" acronym, but it doesn't make any sense. Why not just "Consumer Rights Annulment Provision"? Much less ambiguous, and much more direct.

That said... Yes. The Cayman Islands and a couple other small nations serve as fiduciary havens, not infrastructure.

--Joe

Re:Survey Says?

[nettdata]

Except it's hardly ever the company itself that is doing the promotions... it's third-party people that target them and convince others, via spam, to invest in the company, which drives the prices up, which allows them to unload their own stock at a profit.

All while being 100% unrelated to the company.

Re:SPAM origins

[the packrat]

My hunch is telling me that the purveyor of this message is using some sophisticated means of harnassing zombie machines to send messages, and is only sending a few messages at a time so that automated blackhole lists never catch on fast enough. (such as spamhaus)

It's not a 'hunch'. I try to stop spam coming from a large devolved university network with a great number of varyingly maintained windows boxes and many different mail servers. A little over a year ago, spam zombie machines stopped flooding tens of thousands of messages an hour and started leaking out a handful every now and then. A few months later, the email-borne virus folks caught up.

It makes them a lot harder to spot.

For what it's worth, blacklists are effectively useless. Almost all spam now comes from poorly secured workstations and personal machines attached to ISPs and other organisations. All you're going to do with a blacklist is irritate organisations who have users with poorly configured machines. This includes practically everyone. The spammers are just going to move on to another part of their massive botnet, only legitimate email will be blocked.

Likewise, your blocking of entire class A-sized-blocks, particularly as with tight IP space, a lot of blocks are being broken up and moved round, is pretty pointless. Reminds me of a post some years ago by someone who claimed you could stop lots of spam for no loss by blocking mail from all TLDs other than .edu, .gov, .edu, and .net. Ho ho ho. B>

Re:China has cheap broadband access

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States some frustrated folks of either left or right leaning political persuasion sometimes say, "if xxxxxx happens/wins/etc..., then I'm moving to Australia!"

What they don't seem to have observed is that Australia is one of the few places in the world that seems to be even nuttier than the U.S. All the ridiculous laws, entrenched interests, and piss-away-your-rights mentality of the US, but without the US Constitution's theoretical protections of basic rights. I think the only reason Australia hasn't gone around and f****d up the rest of the world like the US is that Australia literally doesn't have enough population and money to do it -- not because of any lack of desire. Australia might even be the source of some of the problems with the United States: Rupert Murdoch is Australian.

Australia would probably be a pretty good place for a lot of American right-wingers, but it seems like a pretty piss-poor place to plant yourself if you've had it up to here (gesturing above nose) with Bush, let alone protectionist telcos!

Re:What kind of a moron buy stock from spam?

[nettdata]

Huh? It doesn't take much to be able to buy stock online... hell, my MOTHER can do it with her online banking.

And who the hell would buy ANYTHING from spam? Oh yeah... lots of idiots. Same goes for Nigerian scams, etc.

It's just a different product, with next to no money trail because you're only benefitting from the idiots pushing the price up.

And as to the stock scam, just what money do you follow? People are making legit purchases, of a legit stock. The only bitch is that someone OTHER than the company is marketing it to push the price up so that they can sell at a profit.