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.
First Post (Score:1, Funny)
Spam'd
Re:First Post (Score:4, Funny)
Woohoo! (Score:1)
We're #2! We're #2! We're #2!
Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Funny)
We're #2! We're #2! We're #2!
In so many ways.
Re:Woohoo! (Score:4, Funny)
This could serve as an inspiration to some movie script writer-
In a world where.....One man set out to generate enough spam to make his country proud. This is the story of courage, and determination...
You get the gist?
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What? You think Windows is this flawed by coincidence? You really think that Windows-related spam and malware is just an accident? Who was the genius behind DOS and Windows at Microsoft any way? Who micro-managed it to the empire that it is?
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Don't worry, in the bedroom America will always come first.
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Sorry we don't have quite so many sheep to practice on.
I beg to differ ... (Score:5, Funny)
More than 122 million cans of the SPAM® family of products are sold worldwide each year, 90 million in the U.S. alone.
Sounds to me like the US is still the leader!
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Whooosh!
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Whooosh!
How so? Or did you read it?
Whooosh-maybe!
Re:I beg to differ ... (Score:4, Informative)
Just to continue the "missing the joke" thread, all 12 of Hormel's production facilities are in the US, which would mean that the US is the *only* source of SPAM.
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Just to continue the "missing the joke" thread, all 12 of Hormel's production facilities are in the US, which would mean that the US is the *only* source of SPAM.
...the only source of SPAM sold in the USA is the USA.
But SPAM here is, I think, made in Denmark (see here [spam-uk.com]).
(I've never bought it -- it's pretty disgusting, after all -- but the label probably just says "Made in the EU".)
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Ahh, I saw something on the Hormel site which indicated that the Hormel Foods International subsidiary exported to 40 countries. So don't worry, the nasty meat you don't want to eat is probably the same as the nasty meat I don't want to eat.
You know what, this is a discussion that I never, ever thought I would be having.
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On such an important matter, always refer to the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]. They're never wrong!
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'....
Congratulations are in order ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that of course it is well known that most spam is pumped out of botnets. And the botnets are usually spread out all over the world. Really, this just tells us that less spamming botnet activity is coming from the US than Brazil in that particular observed time frame. This could be attributed to any of a number of factors.
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Exactly. And this line in the summary doesn't just make sense:
The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP.
Didn't it take just some days while the botnets moved elsewhere and spam level was same again? McColo was hosting C&C for the botnets, not actually spamming itself.
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I admit, I don't know how a botnet exactly works, but I understand that one can "rent" time on them.
If the botnet was told "for the next X days, send out this spam" and they didn't queue up another command to follow, perhaps the McColo takedown corresponded with the end of a block of time.
Of course, this reminds me that I need to check my EVE training queue.
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Also, supply and demand (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting questions... (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'd like to see is statistics on where the spam-producing criminals are, and where are their "customers", rather than counting where the botnet is
That may be a more difficult question than you might expect. Finding the person who is writing the spam and sending instructions to the botnet to send the spam is one thing, but it isn't the only thing. As we have seen before, there are plenty more spammers available to take the place of any who might fall from the top.
The customers, however are another thing entirely. While many of our favorite spammers may be in a few select locations, their customers are generally distributed all over the world - or so we would believe from the WHOIS data. Unfortunately, there isn't generally much better records for the customers than the WHOIS data for the domains that are being spamvertised. And we know that the WHOIS data is itself generally questionable on a good day and utter crap any other day. Of course you could also trace the IP address of the webserver for the spamvertised domain, but that will only lead to to where the site is hosted, which doesn't tell you where the "company" actually is.
I bet Brazilians, Russians or Chinese aren't doing that much good business in selling Viagra (may contain plaster) or Genuine Quartz Rolexes, or more importantly, buying them
As I said earlier, those classifiers depend on who you are trying to describe. I can tell you from my experience that a significant portion of the spam I receive is spamvertising domains registered in Russia or China. And there are often other servers along the way to keep the operation going that are distributed in various places in Pacific Ocean countries, Africa, or South America. Although of course since the registrars are generally in on the deal, they are intentionally posting garbage WHOIS records for the domains in question.
IMHO: if you eliminated the spam that either comes from American criminals
Again that comes down to how you classify the criminals. Spamming is generally an international endeavor now, though.
or which is targeted at Americans, there'd be no spam
I think an argument could be made that not much spam anymore really targets any particular country. I would say that a primary reason why so much spam is written in English is just because it is one of the most read languages on the internet; hence a spam in English has a very good chance of getting to someone who can read English. When Mandarin or Hindi take over we'll see more spam in those languages (I have seen Chinese and Japanese spam for years in some of my inboxes).
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spamvertising domains registered in Russia or China
Here's the brilliant thing about the internet, I don't need to be a Russian or Chinese person to register a .ru or .cn address.
I apologize for the lack of clarity, I was referring to where the WHOIS data says the spamvertised domain is located. I prefer to go after the people behind the spamvertised domain, because they are the ones paying the spammer. Other people may prefer to instead go after the owner of the IP address that relayed the spam (though from my point of view botnet spamming has made that a useless effort). Still others may instead prefer to find the IP for the spamvertised website, and go after the ISP responsibl
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Yep, the source of the problem is who ever is making money off the whole thing. Nothing can be done until we solve that one.
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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.
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I can tell you from my experience that a significant portion of the spam I receive is spamvertising domains registered in Russia or China
I'll follow up to that with the following screenshot of one of my inboxes (which, incidentally, is not protected by SpamAssassin)
Sorry, I don't speak Sputnik [shaunc.com]
Most of the spam I get these days is for Russians, by Russians. I have no idea what the hell it's advertising.
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I have a custom SpamAssassin rule that bumps russian language mails up a few points. I do the same for the chinese language messages.
The chinese spammers *really* like sending chinese spam to my webmaster@ address...
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But it does seem that the vast majority of spam is indeed english, ime.
Shitfuckbollockswankpissholesinthesnow (Score:1)
That means it's almost time for all those "Top ten bla bla bla 2009" articles, doesn't it? Truly, my cup runneth over.
USA Numba One! (Score:1, Redundant)
Yes but we never give up. We will strive to be on top of this list no matter what it takes. Come rain, sleet or snow we will be leveraging our synergies, overcoming any obstacle to our dominance in the market of bullshit. Make no mistake.. .. We will not rest until that great land of bullshit has a US flag planted firmly in it's bung hole with some weasel counting the beans coming out of the "back end"!
Well... if you're asking for it.. (Score:2)
You want more spam? Give me your email address...
Offtopic- Are we getting more mod points? (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Re:Offtopic- Are we getting more mod points? (Score:5, Informative)
It's in FAQ [slashdot.org]
Why do I have 10 moderator points instead of the usual 5?
Congratulations! You are in the top 1% of moderators and have been given the gift of 10 points for your good work. It looks like your mom was wrong when she said all those hours on Slashdot wouldn't get you anything.
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Thanks for the clarification!
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Holy shit, the FAQ's been actually updated withing the last 10 years!
Although I had no idea it was possible to get 10 mod points now, I notice that I was getting them much more frequently than I used to, even though I barely ever moderate. There's nothing about that in the FAQ as far as I can see though.
Re:Offtopic- Are we getting more mod points? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Offtopic- Are we getting more mod points? (Score:5, Funny)
...slashdot's way of telling me to stop posting and start reading.
It's views like that that have ruined slashdot. The day that I am discouraged from participating in off-topic flamewars and trolling with copypasta, all the while wielding my stash of mod points like a righteous crowbar of indignation, is the day I lose hope in all that is right in the world!!
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Mod points? What are those? I haven't seen any in literally 7 years.
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Probably amongst the many who got blacklisted from modpoints.
U. S. continues to fall behind (Score:4, Funny)
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Learn something new every day (Score:5, Funny)
A little trick I like to call "math"... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP"
Oh, really?
According to the very links kdawson uses to back this idea up, the botnet was off line for what, maybe 2 weeks... out of a 52 week year. So if they accoutned for all of the US spam, that outage would result in a drop of 4%.
But looking at the other numbers in TFS, it looks like there was in fact a drop of something like 25%.
So yes, it may have had something to do with it. In the same sense that the increase in temperature in my house may have had something to do with letting the dog back in (but probably had more to do with having the furnace repaired).
little blue pills! (Score:1)
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now where am i going to buy my viagra?! doomed to be a geeky flacid virgin for life!Cancel Reply
Fixed that for ya.
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Not our fault; it's the economy (Score:1, Redundant)
Woo Hoo! I RBL'ed .br (Score:2)
Geez, I dropped the known .br IP blocks into a blackhole years ago. This may explain why my just-for-spam address receipts have been dropping.
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Why don't you whitelist the blocks from your region instead?
Banning Brazil is a stupid thing because:
a. The majority of spammers aren't using Brazilian IP's;
b. The majority of Brazilian IP's aren't being used by spammers, legitimate users will come and they should not be blocked.
Besides that's kind of a dick move, the US has been the top spam source for years and no one banned their IP ranges.
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White listing, black listing... the result is the same. It's easier for me, on my non-business, nothing special home web/mail server, to drop vast IP blocks. If someone sees something about my site they want to comment on, they can use my mail form. If there's someone in particular I want to correspond with, I can white list them. I seriously doubt there's anyone who's legitimate email is going to be affected by me being a dick admin.
US dollar (Score:1, Offtopic)
Does this make the US dollar spam? We print about five trillion a year.
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You should use coins.
(For comparison, there are 5.6 billion 1€ coins in circulation, for roughly the same population.)
What? (Score:1, Redundant)
Are we world leaders in anything anymore? Sheesh!
C'mon, team USA! Get out there and spam one for the Gipper!
That sucks! (Score:1)
We used to be the best at everything.
Then we lost our position in the world as upholders of human rights.
Followed by our economy going down the drain.
Then the dollar lost its place as best currency.
Now we're losing our position as Spam leaders?!
There's nothing left.. I'm jumping out of the sinking ship!
A Brazilian (Score:5, Funny)
The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages.
From now on, 7.7 trillion will be known as one Brazilian.
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Brazil, Columbia and Italy (Score:4, Informative)
I can't really say I'm surprised by this at all.
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Enforcing helo name sanity in Postfix will, by itself, drop your load by 50-60%. Even without querying external DNSBLs.
Start with "reject_invalid_helo_hostname", then "reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname" and finally "reject_unknown_helo_hostname" (if you're using Postfix 2.6 or later). The last check isn't especially safe on a loaded mail server wh
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I'll be happier where I am now, though. It's a lot better for me.
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Your anti-spam software was not automatically doing this based on statistics?
I used Trend Micro IMSS at my last job and although most spam was blocked by RBL's (if you're on an RBL you don't get an SMTP connection) I'd still get one or two addresses a week temporarily blocked simply because they crossed the spam threshold.
Trend was blocking 85% of spam on R
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I suppose if you can detect this kind of behaviour you can script it, name it something innocuous and commit the cardinal sin of not documenting it (unless they never check the doco).
Not really an expert on Spam Assassin, my last job paid for the Trend Micro Suite which came with IMSS and my new job doesn't seem to get spam (don't know what's up with that, I'm new here and nothing was doco'ed)
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What time frame? (Score:2)
These figures are over what span of time, a year? Calendar year 2008? Last week? One weekend? An acquaintance used to send most of his over weekends, when fewer senior admins were around to notice and more people were at home and likely to actually read mail and respond
Better title for post? (Score:1)
Shouldn't the title be, US loses leadship position in internet technology and marketing?
Humanity shooting itself in the foot (Score:1)
7.7 trillion...
What a waste, the immenseness of counter-productivity is mind boggling. So much annoyance and so much overhead for a problem entirely maintained by human idiocy.
When will they wise up and stop doing stupid shit?
never (Score:2)
We are not a civilization, we are an alien reality show "those crazy apes". They carefully direct us to remain this stupid through careful inbreeding programs.
Anything to keep the ratings. Today on "Those crazy apes", a planet that produced enough food for dinosaurs still has people starving on one side and unable to stand on their own legs on the other.
Sure, critics have called the show repetitive, but who can not get enough of those silly monkeys who haven't even discovered slood yet. Make sure to turn
Don't be sad! (Score:3, Insightful)
You are still world leader in CO2 pollution!