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Russia Acknowledged As Spam Superpower
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-02-12
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The United States may send out the most spam due to botnetted computers, but Russia has gained second place.
 | | Russia Acknowledged As Spam Superpower |  |
On a continental scale, Asia and Europe both outpace North America in dishing out spam. The latest assessment from security firm Sophos for Q4 2007 found lots of spam coming from the US - a bit more than one in five junk emails.
Sophos blamed this on compromised computers, being run as part of botnets. These machines relay spam at the behest of remote controllers; many machines likely fell victim to one of numerous variations on the Storm worm, probably delivered through a spam message.
Russia moved up to number two in the list of countries passing spam in the fourth quarter of last year. Machines from the country pushed out 8.3 percent of spam circulating, according to Sophos.
Once you start looking at the continental level of spam, it's easy to see how Russia and third place China (including Hong Kong) vex the Internet. Asia dealt out 32.1 percent of Q4 spam, with Europe pushing 27.1 percent into inboxes.
"It's not the case that a third of the world's spammers are based in those countries, but that legions of computers are poorly defended, allowing hackers to break in and turn them into botnets for the spreading of spam and malware," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.
US ISPs spend too much time worrying about online video bandwidth and peer to peer traffic, and not nearly enough about compromised machines on their networks cranking out thousands of spams. There doesn't seem like a way to avoid noticing a residential client churning out thousands of messages by itself, unless ISPs choose not to see it.
We have noted our views on Russia and China previously. Sophos research confirms our assertion about spam coming from the two countries, not to mention active security threats seen repeatedly.
Broadband providers in the US have to be part of the solution. There has to be a way for them to see enormous levels of outgoing mail from a client system, observe some of those messages bouncing back, and tell those clients to clean up their PCs or risk losing service.
If you can bottle up torrent traffic at the behest of Hollywood studios, you can look more closely at the spam problem, maybe work with some of the gateway security companies that do spam-fighting to identify systems that need to be fixed.
We can't see botnetted machines being an unsolvable problem in the US.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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