US No Longer Leading the World In Spam 96
darthcamaro writes "America is no longer the spam king. According to Cisco, US-originated spam dropped by over two trillion messages — American-based IP addresses sent about 6.2 trillion spam messages. The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages. 'I'm not completely surprised to see US falling to number two in the spam stats, but I didn't expect it to happen yet,' said Cisco Fellow Patrick Peterson. 'I was really gratified to see the actual spam volume decrease, not just ranking, but we [also] decreased the amount of spam that is pouring out of the United States.'" The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP.
Anyone ever wondered if spam might be used by NSA? (Score:1, Interesting)
Couldn't "they" send TCP packets to target servers under the guise of having been sent from spambots?
Lots of alleged NSA affiliated IPs seem to be associated with ad/spam delivery:
http://cryptome.org/0001/nsa-ip-update14.htm [cryptome.org]
http://cryptome.org/0001/nsa-l3-peers.htm [cryptome.org]
Just askin'....
Re:Congratulations are in order ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting questions... (Score:3, Interesting)
Following the money will lead you to a money transfer mule, then to a Western Union or Moneygram branch, and then the trail runs cold.
You could clamp down on money transfer services, but that will affect legitimate users of those services - people sending money to family members in other countries, perhaps in an emergency situation; and anyway, the criminals would just go to another method of cashing out, like for example the purchasing and forwarding agent scam.