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Why The New IP Address System Might Be A Spammer’s Worst Nightmare

25/07/2013

Spam may be the bane of our cyber-existence, but there are geographic considerations that go into producing it. One way security companies (...)
Spam may be the bane of our cyber-existence, but there are geographic considerations that go into producing it. One way security companies guard clients against junk mail and other attacks is by blocking IP where has been known to originate. When too many IP get in one place, spammers pack up and move to a neighboring country and keep going. By looking at IP blacklist data, we can see one such dance taking place in eastern Europe earlier this year. In January, only about 5% of IP in Belarus were being blocked, a number that rose to almost 30% in May. The same study, produced by international message security company Cloudmark, points out that Romania currently has the most IP of any country. Spammers probably switched to using IP in nearby Belarus and Russia to get around the problem, causing the spike in Belarusian addresses. But then hosting companies in those countries wised up, implemented tighter restrictions, and forced them back to Romania’s more permissive hosts, which caused Belarusian IP blocks to drop back to normal levels in May. It’s difficult to assess output because there are multiple ways to measure it: You can look at it in terms of how many messages are produced, how many IP are blocked, or the percentage of in a given country, to control for population. Many sources cite the three countries with the largest populations, China, India and the U.S., as the origins for the majority of spam. This makes some amount of sense, but it doesn’t tell the full story unless you adjust the data for population and number of allocated IP addresses.Read Full Story    
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