Offshoring Spam

BusinessWeek has a short article on the recent trend of spammers in sending spam from servers in China and South Korea -- either by using hosted servers or hijacking unsuspecting PCs. The trend is seen as a move to avoid litigation in US by ISPs, especially with the new Can Spam Act [PDF] in effect in the US. China is great for spammers because it is highly unregulated, although the Chinese government is moving to close that gap -- and South Korea is fairly attractive, as it has one of the world's most advanced broadband implementation and penetration. Since February, spam originating from China has increased from 6.24% to 11.62%, while South Korea originating spam has increased from 5.8% to 15.42% of the world's total. The US however continues to be the biggest exporter of spam, accounting for 42.53%. Canada is doing pretty good -- since February, we've managed to reduce our spam output from 6.8% of the world's, to 2.9% -- we're number 5 on the list.