Article about spam from China by David Geer

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26 The HOSTING STANDARD

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AND, SUDDENLY,

Story By David Geer

CHINA

IS HOSTING

THE SPAM

BUSINESS

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Anti-Spam solutions firm Commtouch

reports a predominant and growing

Spam site hosting presence in China.

he Spam Detection Center at Com-

mtouch, specialists in anti-Spam solu-

tions, found in April that 71 percent

of the sites linked in Spam emails are

hosted in China, according to a May 3

Commtouch press release.

While the US sends most of the Spam

that we are beset with globally at 60.5

percent, laws in the US make it dif-

ficult to secure continuously

reliable Spam site hosting

there. Conditions off-

shore however, espe-

cially in China, make

it easy to find Spam site

hosting there.

Multiplying the US and

Chinesefiguresgivesyouatleast

43 percent of Spam emails initiated

by US Spammers that will send you to

links hosted in China.

The “Win/Win” for Spammers and

China-based hosts

Skirting the law

China-based Web hosts are an effective

way to circumvent U.S. laws like CAN-

SPAM as well as those of other well-

regulated countries currently inundated

with unwanted commercial (and some-

times malicious) emails.

AccordingtoAvnerAmram,executive

vice president, Commtouch, legislators

in the U.S. and abroad need to consider

the global nature of Spam when looking

at how to deter those who make Spam

profitable, whether they be the Spam-

mer, or the companies whose products

or services the Spammers promote.

Since US laws can’t stop China-based

hosts, they invest heavily in offering the

most reliable destination site hosting

that a Spammer could want, and they

make a good Chinese RenMinBi (RMB)

doing it too.

Bulletproof Spamming

The most reliable hosting is bulletproof

hosting. “Bulletproof Hosts are servers

thatareguaranteedtobeupabout99per-

cent of the time,” says Susan Larson,

Vice President, Global Product Content,

SurfControl, provider of complete work-

placeInternetcontentfilteringproducts.

With bulletproof hosting, Spammers

are assured that huge increases in online

Viagra sales traffic, for example, won’t

bring those servers down.

It’s not only the quality and redundan-

cy of the server technologies expected

with bulletproof hosting, but also the

fact that there is no legislation to make

these ISPs turn them off.

According to Larson, because the laws

are less stringent, Chinese and other

offshore hosts have no problem keeping

these sites up. “In fact, for their ISPs, it’s

their whole job to host these bulletproof

sites. (And the return on investment to

the Spammer is much more guaran-

teed),” says Larson.

Someone else’s U.S. buck is my

several RenMinBis

The conversion rate from US$ to the

Chinese RMB keeps bulletproof host-

ing reasonable for Spammers and very

profitable for the Chinese. Spammers

need only a small percentage of click-

throughstomakealotofmoney.“[They]

pay dearly to have these sites guaranteed

to be up. In China, they charge about

the same as hosts in the U.S. do, but it’s

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China

Brazil

South Korea

Russian Federation

Canada

Pakistan

U.K.

Romania

Germany

71%

22%

2.3%

1.8%

1.5%

0.6%

0.24%

0.07%

0.03%

0.06%

The Top Ten Countries in Global

Distribution of Spam Web sites

- Commtouch, April 2004.

Commtouch reports that the top

10 countries in global distribution

of Spam Web sites in the month of

April are:

In fact, for their ISPs, it’s their

whole job to host these bullet-

proof sites. (And the return

on investment to the spammer is

much more guaranteed),” says

Susan Larson, Vice-President,

Global Product Content,

SurfControl.

a lot more profitable [for Chinese Web

hosts],” says Larson.

What is China doing to combat the prob-

lem?

With all its strides toward openness,

China is still quite closed. It would be

extremelytryingevenfortheUS topeti-

tion the Chinese government to make

changes in the law surrounding email

solicitations. Where laws regarding ISPs

exist, the authority to enforce them has

not matured. “It appears [however] that

China’s regulatory commission is start-

ing to regulate inbound Spam to the

Chinese,” says Larson.

In 2003, the Internet Society of China

(ISC) began to regulate what it recog-

nized to be massive chunks of Spam

comingintoChina.“Thecostoflostpro-

ductivity was [enormous],” says Larson.

Chinese authorities are beginning

to take a more aggressive look at out-

bound Spam. According to Larson,

over the last six months, ISPs in China

have just begun to get an awareness and

understanding of what their servers are

being used for, in large part because the

volume of Spam in China has gone up

so much.

Bulletproof hosts secure Spam in other

countries, but…

The pattern in offshore Spam hosting

trends first the arrival of Spam host-

ing in unregulated countries where the

Internet is still developing. “The tech-

nology precedes the law,” says Larson.

As regulation and enforcement appear,

Spammers take their business to coun-

tries where conditions will again be

favorable.

“We’ve seen these bulletproof hosts

coming on board and they’ve been in

various places that we’ve traced - Africa,

Malaysia, Turkey, Russia and other

parts of Eastern Europe. The difference

is that China is the new biggest and best,

based on the fact that its Internet is in

its infancy, and that there aren’t a lot of

applicable laws,” says Larson.

China is a larger country, giving it

plenty of time to move through this evo-

lutionary process before it can dispense

much with Spammers. It’s also a big

place for bulletproof Spam hosts to find

safety in numbers, to hide out, to disap-

pear into the crowd.

“It seems like it’s all gone the way of

China. There is more of a problem here

than we’ve seen before. Before it’s been

[spread out across] various parts of

the world. Now there is an enormous

amount of [Spam hosting in] China,”

says Larson.

China will play host to this problem

relatively longer than other countries

have.

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