Top 10 Worst Spam Service Providers and Their Origin

Spamhaus Project, an international non-profit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations, providing realiable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, working closely with Law Enforcement Agencies whose purpose is to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, released its Top Worst Spam Lists of ISPs, Countries of Origin and more, yesterday.

Publishers of the Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) – a database collating information and evidence on the ‘100’ known worst spam gangs worldwide, Spamhaus helps target and mount prosecutions against professional spammers.

Countries with the highest number of spammers operating within their networks are usually those with poor or non-existent spam laws. The world’s worst Spam Haven countries today are:

10 Worst Spam Origin Countries as of 06 January 2009 (by order and number of known issues)

1. United States – 1513
2. China – 456
3. Russian Federation – 289
4. United Kingdom – 221
5. South Korea – 205
6. Germany – 165
7. Japan – 153
8. Brazil – 151
9. France – 134
10. India – 133

You can view the full listing of flagged Spam ISPs per country here. It will be interesting to find out if your current service provider is included in Spamhaus’s report. If any reason it is, you should seriously consider on finding alternatives.

Surprisingly, from Spamhaus’s published 10 Top Worst Spam Networks yesterday, Google ranks as number 3, from their list. While the majority of the world’s service providers succeed in keeping spammers off their networks and work to maintain a positive anti-spam reputation – such as Google, some unfortunately, choose to be part of the problem.

An excerpt from informationweek tells us that Google has responded to this situation by immediately disabling all the accounts that were listed by Spamhaus in their report.

As Spamhaus describes the situation, companies on its spam list are complicit by design, by parsimony, or by incompetence.

But Google doesn’t really fit any of those descriptions. It has a capable anti-spam team and has been active in trying to keep spammers off of its services. It continues to invest in security and recognizes the need to close holes that are discovered. And it has policies designed to limit the abuse of its services by spammers and to encourage community policing.

The problem Google, along with every other online service provider, faces is that online services that can be abused will be abused. And usually it’s the
spammers and criminals who figure out how to abuse services before anyone else. Many of the infractions cited by Spamhaus, for example, involve Google services like Google Docs that are used to redirect visitors to malicious sites.
Google typically closes such holes, sooner or later. In fact, the company says that it has been in touch with Spamhaus and has been taking steps to remedy the issues raised by the organization.

“Spam is an issue for all Internet users, and we actively work to disable accounts that are found to be in violation of our product policies,” a Google spokesperson said via e-mail. “As such, the relevant accounts indicated in this report have already been disabled.”

In any event, the internet will continue to have Spam problems as it grows more and more each day. Spammers are becoming more sophisticated and their robots more intelligent. It is something that we all will just have to deal with and hope that organizations, such as Spamhaus will make the internet a better place to surf-in:)