India crowned global spam-spewing zombie king AGAIN

India has cemented its position as the world's biggest fire hose of spam email, according to new figures. Hacked computers in the republic working on behalf of crooks spewed more than one in ten of the globe's spam mails in the last quarter, reported web security firm Sophos. India is home to 5.3 per cent of the world’s …

[Anonymous Coward]

And in the UK......

Fantastic news, that we are not the perpetrators, but only the victims!

Hooray

[Shane8]

What?!

Russia only 10th?! Must of received at least 10 directing me to .ru in the past week!

[Z80]

Re: What?!

You must have missed the bit in the article which explained that the content of a spam message doesn't necessarily indicate the location of the computer used to send it.

[Evan Essence]

Re: What?!

You must have missed the bit

He must've thought the abbreviation of "must have" is spelled "must of".

[Ru]

Re: What?!

Please also note the title of the score table: spam-relaying countries.

[TonyHoyle]

India??

I'd trust Spamhaus any day over an antivirus vendor, given that it's their area of expertise. Their chart makes more sense too.. (India? I don't think I've *ever* had a spam from India).

That has:

1. USA

2. China

3. Russia

4. UK

5. Brazil

[Christine Hedley]

Re: India??

"India? I don't think I've *ever* had a spam from India"

I get an endless stream of spam attempts from India, seemingly all of them to addresses that have never existed: it appears someone out there is still buying those lists of "double opt-in and verified" addresses, astonishingly. It's pretty much consistently at the top of the list of countries trying to spam me, but very few of them if any are actually successful.

[Evan Essence]

Re: India??

My experience of Chinese spam (shilling .com sites, not .cn as the article alleges) is that it goes to my eBay or PayPal addresses. I don't get spam from UK vendors.

As a result, I'm not going to buy stuff from Chinese eBay vendors again. Way to go, China.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: India??

Spamhaus should be the last corporate entity to trust. Their 'ethics' are way worse than spammer's, they conduct blackmail, at least with spam you get to choose to just ignore it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: India??

they conduct blackmail

Care to elaborate?

[Vic]

Re: India??

> I don't think I've *ever* had a spam from India

Do you want some of mine? They've been very prevalent lately.

Very few spams get through to me these days, but my filters[1] really aren't helped by the clueless fuckwits who insist on terminating their SPF records with "+all". For the uninitiated, that means "yes, absolutely everyone is explicitly authorised to send mail on behalf of my domain".

Grrr.

Vic.

[1] Yes, I know SPF isn't anti-spam. But my Spamassassin rules consider SPF authentication to be fairly indicative of hammy mail...

[David Eddleman]

Re: India??

Or those who use softfail in their SPF entries. Which means messages are flagged but absolutely nothing happens.

[Vic]

Re: India??

> Or those who use softfail in their SPF entries

SOFTFAIL is perfectly acceptable - it's easy to get something wrong the first time you try it.

You can use that in SA filters if you think that's a good idea.

But hard authorisation - that shouldn't be a reason to score a mail as spammy. +all is a disaster..

I'd like to see it removed from the standard, TBH. I can see no legitimate reason for it. Orthogonality be buggered.

Vic.

[Nick Kew]

Re: India??

Yep. The US has always topped the table, though a breakdown of their states would be interesting given that a few are spam-havens while others have decent anti-spam laws.

India doesn't even appear in Spamhaus's top ten.

[Bakunin]

Spam overload from India

Well at least that takes some of the focus off of the continuous telephone based spam.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam Olympics

Go Team India

- Sanjay

[TRT]

No Nigeria?

So what's happened to all the cheques I've been sending there?

[Serif]

The more interesting figure is Italy coming in second. It just confirms what I've noticed on my own servers where mail from Italian addresses is treated as "special".

[That Steve Guy]

India huh?

Looks like even the spammers are being outsourced to India.

[David Eddleman]

Not surprised

India has poor security and ISPs that simply do not care about their subscribers sending spam out. The major Indian ISPs are denied at my firewalls as a result. Totally not surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not surprised

Isn't it great that all of this country's financial institutions have all of their systems completely open to such a fine, secure, completely incorruptible place!

[Coen Dijkgraaf]

ProjectHoneyPot

www.ProjectHoneyPot.org also list India as the top offender recently, however the ranking of the rest is quite different.

Top Spam Server Countries (last 30 days)

#1 [India] India (27.3%)

#2 [Saudi Arabia] Saudi Arabia (7.1%)

#3 [Vietnam] Vietnam (6.9%)

#4 [Peru] Peru (5.8%)

#5 [Brazil] Brazil (4.6%)

#6 [China] China (4.2%)

#7 [Kazakhstan] Kazakhstan (4.2%)

#8 [Turkey] Turkey (3.0%)

#9 [South Korea] South Korea (2.5%)

#10 [United States] United States (2.3%)

#11 [Romania] Romania (2.1%)

#12 [Russia] Russia (2.0%)

#13 [Pakistan] Pakistan (2.0%)

#14 [Great Britain] Great Britain (1.7%)

#15 [Colombia] Colombia (1.5%)

#16 [Argentina] Argentina (1.5%)

#17 [Mexico] Mexico (1.4%)

#18 [Italy] Italy (1.3%)

#19 [Poland] Poland (1.3%)

#20 [Germany] Germany (1.3%)

#21 [Taiwan] Taiwan (1.1%)

#22 [Iran] Iran (1.1%)

#23 [Spain] Spain (0.9%)

#24 [Chile] Chile (0.9%)

#25 [Morocco] Morocco (0.9%)