The US Continues Its Reign As King of Spam 118
An anonymous reader writes "The United States continues its reign as the king of spam, relaying more than 13% of global spam, accounting for hundreds of millions of junk messages every day, according to a report by Sophos. However, most dramatically, China – often blamed for cybercrime by other countries – has disappeared from the 'dirty dozen,' coming in at 15th place with responsibility for relaying just 1.9% of the world's spam."
Spam (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good filters have hidden the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Low spam from China? (Score:3, Informative)
e-mail to/from China works fine for me in Australia. Almost all of my spam comes from USA.
Re:Hi (Score:3, Informative)
Try greylisting. Anyone using a proper mailer will come through, >90% of spam (my experience) is stopped that way. And actually only mails from new, as yet unknown senders get delayed; friends or business associates you get mail from regularly get through without delay. And what comes through is mostly Nigerian scams, interestingly. Apparently they use proper mailers.
To me this has proven the best anti-spam measure so far. And by the time the spammers catch up it also means their cost of sending has gone up a lot as it is not "fire and forget" any more but real resources need to be allocated. So far they don't.
Re:Hi (Score:2, Informative)
Agreed. greylisting is very effective. That and checking SBL/RBL et al go a LONG way to keeping things at a sane level.
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Informative)
I did a bit of digging, and all the data on host counts appear to be compiled from the ISC Domain Survey [isc.org]. According to the summary on that page, "The Domain Survey attempts to discover every host on the Internet by doing a complete search of the allocated address space and following links to domain names." This would seem to exclude hosts without reverse-DNS records, but I'd need to read the complete study methodology before I could comment intelligently.
I also looked to see if there were easily-available figures on the number of IP addresses allocated by country but couldn't find any.
Regardless of the method for counting hosts, it still seems quite likely that US hosts make up considerably more than 13% of all hosts worldwide.
Re:The real question is... (Score:3, Informative)
CIA Factbook: 383 million (2009); note - the US Internet total host count includes the following top level domain host addresses: .us, .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net, and .org
To be clear .com ending in domain name doesn't translate into US based server or computer. Additionally any other ending in domain name doesn't mean that the server or computer is not located in US. The article is very light on actual technical detail so I wouldn't be able to know how that 13% figure came from, but I wouldn't jump into conclusion that it has anything to do with domain names. Here are numbers on internet usage worldwide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users [wikipedia.org], which would indicate that US should have less than one third of world's zombie machines acting as hosts.
Naturally tracing the origins of spam is quite difficult, counting the zombie machines sending spam is quite accurate since that is what article is really counting. As you said in global economy a Nigerian prince may use Hungarian hacker who uses US based bot net to distribute a spam message about cheap Indian made Viagra.