China home to 70 pct of world's spam
27 Jun 2009, 1349 Hrs

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Washington, June 27 China has links to about 70 percent of the web sites advertised in computer spam, according to a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) computer forensics expert.

Gary Warner, UAB's director of research in computer forensics, has dubbed the trend as "spam crisis in China".

"China has become a safe haven for Web site operators that use spam to promote their products because of the willingness of some Chinese Web-hosting companies to ignore spam complaints about those sites, which are hosted on their servers for a fee. The hosting companies don't create the spam, but rather declare themselves bullet-proof hosting sites - meaning that regardless of the illegal activities being reported, they will not terminate their customer's spam-related Web sites or domains," said Warner.

Computer spam refers to unsolicited commercial advertisements distributed online via e-mail, which can sometimes carry viruses and other programs that harm computers.

To date, the UAB Spam Data Mine has reviewed millions of spam e-mails this year, and successfully connected the hundreds of thousands of advertised Web sites in the spam to 69,117 unique hosting domains.

Warner revealed that 70 percent of the domains reviewed during the study had Internet domains - or addresses - that ended in the Chinese country code ".cn".

In addition, 48,331, 70 percent, of the sites were hosted on Chinese computers.

Further encouraging the Chinese spam epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap domain names.

Domain names based in China can cost as little as one yuan, or 15 cents in U.S. currency, and thus the low domain rates in China encourage Web page operators to buy numerous domains, leading to a continuous stream of spam promoting those various sites.

"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," said Warner.

He claimed that although only a very few companies in China are behind the propagation of the illegal spam activity; it could harm the reputation of their entire nation's Internet presence. (ANI)

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