mapping zombies from comment spam
Spam mostly come from zombie computers. Weblog comment spam comes from zombie networks as well.
I am getting about 40 a day now; all of which are put in my moderation box because they contain words that are in my blacklist (these people are not very creative on the content front.) The IP address that the comment came from is recorded and contained in the email I get notifying me a new comment has been posted. Although it won’t point to the spammer, I though it would be nice to map where the spam is coming from using the Google maps API. In a more effective and useful form, bloggers may send a dedicated webpage their comment spam and it will add the IP to the map/database. Wordpress or other tools can be made to send a copy of the email to this website automatically upon detection of comment spam (there is really no privacy issue here.) I think that would be neat and may help in some way to identify spammers. If anyone is interested in making this happen, let me know, I’ll contribute what I can.
SM pointed me to mailinator.com which is a on-time-e-mail service that is very cool… and also to hostip.info for getting IP information… go there and see if they got your location right.
November 10th, 2005 at 11:57 am
The problem is that “we the people!” cannot do much. Spammers (and fellow virus developers) are not punished by the international law, and often times the judges and juries think of them as naughty geeks. Yes, I know about a few light sentences here and there. After a few month of jail, these criminals will be hired by the IT companies as consultants and paid six figure salaries.
However, think about the millions of hours of time that the most productive members of society spend on removing spam emails. This is aside from the huge network traffic load resulting from this junk. This is a real economic terrorism. We are lucky that Osama and his friends are too dumb to do such things.
I bet the amount of damage from the spamming will soon exceed the loss from petty theft in the US. I suggest long-term hard labor jail sentences (20 years or more without the possibility of parole) for the spammers. Once these jerks tell their friends about “tossing the salad” process in jail, we will see less junk email in our email accounts.
November 10th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
I don’t think we’ll ever get to sentences such as you suggest because guilt is hard to prove and it will need to be worldwide.
The other solution is to start charging real money for sending e-mail. That’s the best solution and one which I support (not to say this would be particularly easy either.)
November 10th, 2005 at 1:46 pm
I respectfully disagree.
In my opinion it is immoral to penalize innocent people (by making them pay money for their emails), for the crime of a few hackers. Besides, although the 2 cents per email price might not look much to the people of USA or EU, but it is a lot (price of a meal) in many third world countries. I also bet that the spammers can easily find a way to send their emails despite the price (using a stolen credit card info,…)
Besides, the majority of the people in the world do not have access to the credit cards. Please note that in many countries people receive their news via email. For example in China and Iran where the government blocks certain websites (or blogs), the blocked news are automatically emailed to the users. I bet the Chinese and Iranian governments would be very happy if the email was not accessible to their people.
My point is the Spam is not evil but the Spammers are.
I do agree with you on the difficulties of catching the Spammers. However, I believe that once we catch one of these worms, we shall make an example by punishing them so that other crooks would think twice before committing the spam.
Finally, passing an international anti-spam law can be a task for the (otherwise useless) UN.