Asian Spam and the Fate of Spam-Ambivalent ISPs

Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@oregon.uoregon.edu

We've all received spam--unwanted commercial email--often touting cheap toner refills, discount Viagra (no prescription needed), online gambling opportunities, or other scams.

Recently, you may have noticed an upsurge in the amount of unreadable spam you've received--spam posted in Korean, Chinese or other non-Western character sets (such as Cyrillic). If so, you are not alone. Spam from Asia (and spam sent from North America and Europe but routed via Asian servers), has greatly increased in recent months, largely because of two factors:

1. There are a large number of systems in Korea, China, Taiwan and Russia that are vulnerable to SMTP relaying (routing email from one location--through an unrelated vulnerable system located elsewhere--to a final target located in yet a third destination). Spammers are exploiting these vulnerable Asian email systems with a vengeance.
2. Several large Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Russian Internet service providers have decided to allow their users to freely send spam. In some cases these ISPs are swayed by what spammers are willing to pay them. Others are not very concerned about spamming American and European users, and simply ignore complaints.

As a result, a growing number of system administrators at sites around the world have begun to block traffic coming from particular systems that have been the source of this sort of abuse. Some ISPs (but not the University of Oregon), have even taken the drastic step of blocking all email from entire regions of Asia. See:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50455,00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50856,00.html

Once blocked in this way, systems may find it very difficult or impossible to get unblocked, particularly when blocking is done on a distributed basis rather than via a centrally administered, well known, and widely used blacklist.

When legitimate customers of those ISPs discover that their emails are being routinely blocked, they will have no choice but to take their business elsewhere. Being spam-friendly is a certain recipe for eventual financial failure--look what happened to AGIS in 1998 ( http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-502030.html?legacy=zdnn )

We mention this phenomenon to you to help you better understand why you may be seeing a large upsurge in the amount of spam from Asia, and also to encourage you to become proactive in the fight against spam. If you know any system engineers and managers at Asian ISPs, urge them to take appropriate steps to control their spam problems while there's still time.