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A new report by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) has concluded that as much as 70 percent of all spam sent in 2009 originated from domains ending in .cn, China’s top-level country domain. Furthemore, the report claims to have confirmed that nearly all of those spam messages originated on Chinese servers.
The study mined millions of spam emails and concluded that they came from 69,117 unique domains. Of that number, 48,552 or 70 percent, were sent from .cn domains. 48,331 were sent from Chinese computers. Chinese domains and servers are ripe for the picking in the minds of spammers for two reasons: 1) Web hosts in China deny the problem and insist that they do not have security issues, and 2) domain names in China are phenomenally inexpensive, costing only about one yuan or 15 U.S. cents.
Gary Warner, UAB’s director of research in computer forensics, insists that China has entered a “spam crisis.”
“Not only is it cheap to operate spam-promoted Web sites through the Chinese technology infrastructure, there is not enough revenue being generated to pay for the creation of programs or entities that could prevent such abuses from taking place,” Warner said.
