Spam from Taiwan 229
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Survey Says? (Score:2)
Re:Survey Says? (Score:5, Informative)
I lived there. Internet access is expensive as it was a government protected monopoly. Check the rates. Cable and Wireless is the company. To visit, see www.candw.ky.
When they first put in internet, they got 2 satelite T1 links for the whole island. Little Cayman and Cayman Brac still did not have internet. They charged $0.25/minute for access on dial up.
Needless to say I didn't get internet until I returned to the states.
They have since gotten a Fiber Optic cable to Jamaca and they now offer DSL. They are running a promotion for $25/month for the first year. That is CI $ not USD. The price is close to US $30/month. Restrictions such as can't compete with the phone company by using VOIP is the norm.
The plan appears to be capped at 256K unless you upgrade to a faster plan. For example the 1024 plan is CI $74. The 512 plan is $59.
Cayman Islands is a nice place to go for diving and sun, but not for internet based business.
Re:Survey Says? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Survey Says? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
--JoeRe:Survey Says? (Score:2)
Cayman Islands is a nice place to go for diving and sun, but not for internet based business.
Surely it depends rather a lot on what sort of Internet-based business we are talking about. Running a spam empire only means sending one relatively short bit of text once - the machines doing the spamming could be anywhere in the world, and, indeed, if I was planning a semi-legal or illegal business, I'd be keen to keep the servers as far away from me (both physically and in terms of hops and audit trails) as po
Re:Survey Says? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know that it does anything about the spam, but hopefully whoever paid for the message gets paid back.
Re:Survey Says? (Score:4, Interesting)
The SEC. Ha. A worthless three letter agency, if you ask me.
The SEC's lawyers wanted my help on stock tout junk faxes. I told them I had the information they wanted and I could get the rest and testify- but only if they were going to put the junk faxers out of business. They had no intention of doing anything. They are just going through the motions, drawing government salaries. I declined to help them.
Like the FCC, another worthless three letter agency.
They fined Fax.com $5.4 million for sending out junk faxes. The FCC's lawyers wanted my help too, if I had bothered with them the fine would have been $240 million. I have files full of those junk faxes.
The FCC did nothing whatsoever to collect. NOTHING
If you or I owed the government money I can assure you they would be collecting from us.
Re:Survey Says? (Score:4, Insightful)
All while being 100% unrelated to the company.
What kind of a moron buy stock from spam? (Score:2)
The rate of return must be damn near nil.
I say give up the fight against spammers and go after the clients instead.
Follow the money.
If somebody's supposed to benefit from this, let them pay $0.32USD per email that's sent.
Otherwise, I'm going to spam myself to promote my podcast.
Re:What kind of a moron buy stock from spam? (Score:2)
That's well considerate! Forget spamming everyone else, just spam yourself! Get the feeling of sending loads of emails, without annoying anyone. Question is, would you also bother setting up your spam filter to block your emails?
I'm going to send some spam myself. TWIT (Score:2)
Strikes me as a very closed off world. (Probably because of all the death threats.
Actually, the spamming (as opposed to the spammers) are highly vulnerable.
It would be easy to shut them down and/or fine them ($1.00 per email message) and have the various postal services collaborate to sue them into oblivion for mail fraud.
I don't imagine you
Re:What kind of a moron buy stock from spam? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 compa
Re:Survey Says? (Score:2)
From the article...
"Spammers themselves, of course, may be located somewhere completely different, such as Boca Raton, USA (for example)."
Any wagers on not RTFA as the cause of this comment??
Re:Survey Says? (Score:2)
I think in the early days of Spam, most spammers were from the USA, but I think that it is spread globally now.
On another note, what is the deal with so many internet scammers being located in Nigeria, or of Nigerian decent??
Re:Survey Says? (Score:2)
If all this was removed my spam volume would be less than a quarter of it's current volume. If all the other foreign language spam was rem
Re:Survey Says? (Score:2)
No kidding. I still wonder why I get so many Russian 'Learn to read english' spams in the U.S. I need a class just to read this Russian spam.
Re:Uh, Taiwan IS CHINA !! (Score:3, Informative)
No, that's Hong Kong that became part of China. Taiwan is that island off the coast that the Communists never captured in the civil war. For various political reasons it is rarely referred to as being a different country, but for all practical purposes it's a totally seperate country.
Whats specific about Taiwan? (Score:2, Interesting)
Availability of relatively cheaper computing power with good bandwidth?
Some legal stuff?
Availability of some skill set?
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan? (Score:5, Informative)
Most people I know there earn about US$15k/yr, and upgrading the RAM in your Pentium3 machine and then the Hard Drive, and then the video card is sort of common practice. Forking out big $$ for Windows XP isn't real easy so a lot of people are running some SP1 version of Windows XP they bought for $1 off the street, and this version gets owned pretty fast, and can't be patched from windows update. So there are lots of bots.
Now 24Mbit internet access is like $5-$10 per month, so you can see there is quite a big engine there for generating spam.
The culture there is such that they love the latest thing, so I could imagine that there would also be a tendency for people to install software off the net that has malware in it as well.
Another thing I noticed is that your average grandmother there seems quite good at using a computer. So I could imagine that there might be more pensioner types sitting there doing some amount of spamming for a little bit of money.
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan? (Score:2)
if you don't think so, see:
google search [google.com]
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan? (Score:2)
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan? -- Outsourcing! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Hinet Lax Policies (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Whats specific about Taiwan? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe so. If you speak to a taiwanese official, you angry China, fearing that you might recognize Taiwan as a political entity different from mainland China. The political correctness wants that you complain at Beijing that the chinese province of Taiwan is sending a lot of spam. Of course they can't do anyhting about it but don't want you to meet the people in charge there.
I guess they have a lot of P2P there too...
China has cheap broadband access (Score:2)
John.
Visit SpamOrHam [spamorham.org] and help in the fight
Re:China has cheap broadband access (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:China has cheap broadband access (Score:2)
Re:China has cheap broadband access (Score:2, Informative)
Re:China has cheap broadband access (Score:2)
But yes, it's terribly expensive, and hopefully that'll change when the country gets upgraded with DSLAM.
Re:China has cheap broadband access (Score:2)
Read past the headline.. Look to the part where they mention ISP's are slow to disconnect. I imagine in France, most ISP's are quick to disconnect a bot spewing stuff.
Re:China has cheap broadband access (Score:5, Interesting)
*Total Population: 60,876,136
*Internet Users: 26,214,174
China
*Total Population: 1,313,973,713
*Internet Users: 111,000,000
I think, that number speaks for itself.
*ref. from CIA World Fact Book [cia.gov]
Re:China has cheap broadband access (Score:2)
I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:3, Interesting)
With this software emulating an open SOCKS proxy, I've been able to detect several scans of port 1080, and then attempts to send e-mail to different servers around the world (i.e. Israel).
I don't remember if I got requests from Taiwan, but I did get them from South Korean IPs.
Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a cool project for a Windows honeypot. Thanks for the link. Outside of honeypots, I've been blanket filtering addresses from APNIC on my mail server for about a year now using some ideas I learned from this [tsg.ne.jp] project (I filter at the mail request level rather than iptables). It's sad to filter an entire geographic region like that, but my users never talk to people from the Pacific Rim that I know of. My server (running XMail [xmailserver.org]) is small, but my logs for the filtered emails constantly show the spam blocked exceeds the number of legit mails by a factor of four.
Since I started filtering, I've turned a couple of other admins onto the idea. I wonder if TW/KR will find themselves in some odd form of network segregation in the future as more people adopt the practice of filtering their IPs. That might push the authorities into a little more action.Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:2)
Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:2)
After reading the AC who replied to you, it would be a factor of THREE that I meant then. Roughly anwhere from 500-1000 blocked APNIC SMTP connections per legit email on my bi-weekly log checks. A couple of my users used their accounts for sites like collegehumor.com, so they are basically spam honeypots without filtering. In fact, I use one of them that was abandoned by the user to feed spamassassin learning (it only has the APNIC filter and no
Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:2)
You've made damn sure of that, haven't you. Personally, I have never encountered a company that did not need to communicate with someone on APNIC from time to time, but maybe you're a sysadmin for a small company that only deals with people in your own hick town.
Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:2)
ALL of APNIC?
You do realize that includes us poor Aussies and New Zealanders too? (I assume since you mentioned Pacific Rim, yes)
Horray! We're part of the western world and considered careless already!
Has someone started a DNSBL to block those who use blocklists yet? Sure its useless, but it would be fun.
Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:2)
I whitelist some countries through a conversion to IP number (see this [hackingspirits.com] for info). So far there are four entries (JP,AU,NZ and IN) in my whitelist. The rest are blanket filtered for now. Don't worry, I don't consider you careless - You replied because you care ;)
Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT (Score:2)
I keep getting POSTs from a web spammer in Malaysia- I've blocked several subnets but your country codes could help this.
The guy looks like he's still learning how to use Perl's LWP to post spam- as spammers go, he's not very good at it.
Hmm... (Score:3, Funny)
China sending spam (Score:3, Interesting)
And they don't need to. With their billion+ population, one fifth of the world can be reached without passing the invisible borders!
Re:China sending spam (Score:2)
Overachievers (Score:5, Funny)
Must not lose! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Must not lose! (Score:2)
Re:Must not lose! (Score:2)
Re:Must not lose! (Score:2)
Re:Must not lose! (Score:2)
Then again I did opt out of most of the legitimitate spammers lists so, if all I get are the scam artist spams that's probably why.
CipherTrust? nothx. (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=255.0.0.0 [trustedsource.org] 255.0.0.0 - "Spam"
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=0.0.0.0 [trustedsource.org] 0.0.0.0 - "Spam"
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=224.0.0.1 [trustedsource.org] 224.0.0.1 - "Unverified"
Since they have most of my favorite subnet
Re:CipherTrust? nothx. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:CipherTrust? nothx. (Score:2)
Of course only the one added by your server is trustable - the others can be anything the spammer wants them to be - including perfectly legitimate IP addresses.
You can easily fight with spammers. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You can easily fight with spammers. (Score:2)
I'm sure they can find a way to open another google account, just like they will find another mail server to relay from.
Where's Nigeria? (Score:3, Funny)
Tie One On (Score:2, Funny)
"Dear Sir or Madam,
This email may to you as a surprise, but I am Mr. Chen Liao, son of former Taiwanese president Lin Liao, who was murdered by ninjas, and I need your help recovering $25 million Taiwanese Dollars..."
SPAM origins (Score:5, Interesting)
Lately, I have been getting spam about stock investments, and I notice that
it was pretty consistent so I started investigating what was going on with
my server. I started marking down ip addresses of the offending servers
and blocking them if I felt they were not legitimate mail servers or if it
was from a country that I know I will not get email from on my personal email
account.
I have been blocking a new server every day for 2 months.
Here is the scarey part. I still get the same email spam every day, but
only once.
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)
I have noticed that these machines are almost always located in Asia,
Latin America, or Eastern Europe...
It got so bad, I just started block entire class A's from countries I know
I am not going to email to or from.
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Re:SPAM origins (Score:2)
Spammers operate via hacked Windows PCs (zombies) distributed all over the world. So many that blocking them is not going to help you.
Spammers repeatedly send the same or similar thing, over time.
That is just the way they work.
Try SpamAssassin, it does quite a good job without having to do so much useless and manual work.
Re:SPAM origins (Score:2)
and bayesian filters.
I was just commenting along the lines of the story, they seem to be using botnets, sending just
a few messages per machine, and concentrate on sending from foreign countries.
Re:SPAM origins (Score:3, Insightful)
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 t
Re:SPAM origins (Score:2)
I do not think automated blacklists are useless. Spamhaus does a pretty good job of blocking known spammer ip addresses. Some of the old blacklists use to block on a class C (or higher) basis without regards to how the ips were broken down. Their philosophy was one of collateral damage will just cause the problem to get solved more quickly. I do not think it is a good philosophy myself, but as I stated, th
Re:SPAM origins (Score:2)
Maybe you are bitter because you
Unblock Them (Score:2)
Re:SPAM origins (Score:5, Informative)
I am not going to email to or from.
[...]
81
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the IP allocation system. Class A networks are not associated with single countries, but with registries. 81, for example, is one of the networks administered by the RIPE NCC; an IP address beginning with 81 could be located anywhere within Europe or the Middle East.
In fact, my very own IP address begins with 81. I live in Britain, which - as you may be aware - is not in "Asia,
Latin America, or Eastern Europe". It's a good thing I don't want to email you, isn't it?
Re:SPAM origins (Score:2)
I was just generalizing.
But they do tend to stick close to one another.
81 being under RIPE, should be in Europe, which sad to say... I have no friends there.
Spam solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
(Fine, mod me down if you think this is off topic.)
Re:Spam solutions (Score:3, Informative)
When an address appears somewhere on the web, especially in discussion forums, guestbooks, and foremost: IANA listings, it is guaranteed to receive spam.
I think the "dictionary attack" story is mostly folklore. When someone receives spam on a never-use
Re:Spam solutions (Score:2)
Websites, guestbooks, and forums shouldn't publically display e-mail addresses. Maybe showing them in a picture file, a graphic, would make it a bit more difficult and could be an okay compromise.
People shouldn't sign up for unwise things lest they use a safety e-mail address where junk can end up at. The creation of services, like paid to surf sites and other sites that promise rewards, can sucker people into signing up to only sell their lists to spammers.
Re:Spam solutions (Score:2)
I don't think that's a real solution. First, it makes legitimate use more difficult (I guess soon someone starts to print e-mail addresses like captchas...). Second, all that 'security' is blown away when one of your acquaintances does something stupid (like installs a trojan that sends all addresses in his addres
Re:Spam solutions (Score:2, Informative)
A surprising number of addresses are taken from private "we will never sell your information" lists (never published anywhere on the interweb). The companies I have contacted about this have always refused to believe that their email lists are involved; perhaps stolen by an ex-employee? I'm not sure.
Second, mu
Re:Spam solutions (Score:2, Interesting)
Greylisting is currently the most effective means I'm usin
Re:Spam solutions (Score:2)
When I enabled greylisting, over 90% of incoming email was greylisted and expired from the greylist; they never came back.
Then I looked at the logical structure of the ACLs (this is exim) and made a simple change; the first thing I now check is the HELO/EHLO syntax. If this fails, they are dropped immediately. The next thing is DNSBL checking, if they are on these then they are dropped.
Now 90% of hits on the greylist come
Re:Spam solutions (Score:2)
Made in Taiwan (Score:2, Funny)
Why doesn't that supprise me ?
Another way to create awareness among chinese (Score:2, Interesting)
How to block Taiwan? (Score:2, Funny)
Anyone care to disclose the ranges?
Re:How to block Taiwan? (Score:2)
and then,
US follows with 24%
all the servers block US mail and you have hardly any spam at all... Great idea Baldrick
Doesn't tally with my experience (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't tally with my experience (Score:2)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:3, Informative)
They're part of China sort of (but not exactly) the way the South was part of the U.S. between 1861 and 1865, except the war to resolve the issue hasn't happened yet. Pray that it doesn't...
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:5, Informative)
Does the People's Republic of China collect taxes in Taiwan? No, the Republic of China does.
Does the PRC actually try to enforce its criminal laws in Taiwan? No, but the ROC enforces its laws.
Does the PRC define the commerce regulations, health regulations, education standards, voting laws, aviation regulations, etc. within the borders of Taiwan? No -- but the ROC does.
Does the PRC have military bases on Taiwan? No
What the U.N., U.S. and Europe say in polite diplo-speak is one thing. The working reality (and the *money* reality) is that Taiwan is a separate country, perhaps not in name, but in operational fact.
You forgot the legal reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Taiwan is effectively its own country. China says its not. China will not trade with any country that recognizes Taiwan's statehood, therefore most countries don't, but also don't recognize China's (PRC) rule over Taiwan (ROC).
In 1949, the communists (PRC) fought a civil war with the then Chinese government (ROC), the communists won, and the ROC fled to Taiwan. China (PRC) claims Taiwan, and Taiwan (ROC) until recently claimed all of China.
It gets a little complicated wit
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2, Funny)
So Taiwan is actually Red China?
(I apologize. I transpose keys too. But that one was just irresistible.)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
In fact, it's the DPRC who's a rogue province there
We have a revolution where a government gets ousted by rebels once per like 1-2 years in the world, and in quite a bit of cases the rebels fail to grab control of the whole country. However, it's not every year when this happen in a billion+ country with nuclear weapons.
misinformation (Score:4, Informative)
ROC used to rule the whole China, mainland and Taiwan combined. They lost the civil war in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan. Neither PRC nor ROC see each other as a ligitimate government of China. At least both constitutions claim largely overlapping territories. It's a stalemale over half a century.
How people are so casual about the facts is beyond me.
Re:misinformation (Score:2)
You should try it sometime it can be loads of fun.
Other then adding democratic to the name because as I mentioned above I am some form of monkey, I really didn't go into anything you said. Thanks for adding to the discussion, but I didn't cover any of the facts you're claiming I'm casual about.
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Re:Taiwan China ... (Score:2)
Time for a history lesson? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It Makes Sense!!! (Score:2)
That's just broken Unicode (Score:2)
Re:China + China (Score:3, Informative)