Organised criminals based in Russia are fuelling the rise in the amount of spam sent over the Internet, according to a leading opponent of junk mail.
Steve Linford, director of The Spamhaus Project, warned on Tuesday that these gangs are supplying US-based spammers with details of compromised PCs that can be used to send out their unsolicited commercial messages, and creating viruses that will create more of these open proxies.
"There is a new level of criminality in the spamming world," Linford told the Openwave Messaging Anti-Abuse conference in London. "Russian gangs are creating viruses and proxies and selling them onto US spammers."
According to Linford, these Russian gangs aren't constrained by any anti-spam or cybercrime laws in their home country and have no respect for legislation implemented in other countries.
Linford also told the conference that some 70 percent of spam is sent from China by American spam outfits who are hosting their servers with Chinese ISPs. In many cases the spammers have set up firewalls so that the ISPs can't actually see what's being hosted.
"We keep battling with Chinese ISPs who don't understand what we are complaining about," said Linford, whose organisation run a number of blacklists in an attempt to prevent spammers sending their wares out onto the Web.
Estimates vary for the extent of the spam problem, with MessageLabs reporting on Tuesday that 76 percent of the emails it scanned in May were spam -- a greater percentage than ever before.
Linford, who was scathing about the anti-spam laws that have been brought in by the British and American governments, believes that this trend will probably continue.
"While the UK and US put the concerns of the direct marketing industry ahead of the interests of citizens, this problem will continue to get worse. Unless things change drastically, we predict that 80 percent of email will be spam by December this year, and it's very likely to go to 90 percent by this summer," Linford warned.
ZDNet UK's Graeme Wearden reported from London. For more coverage from ZDNet UK, click here.
9 out of 10 unsolicitated emails (spam) would go away if any of the email programs (Mozilla / Eurdora / Outlook) would add a facility to only allow emails that are from people in your address book. Why isn't this facility available? Who cares if the sender has to ring you up and ask to be added to an address book. I'd love to have this feature!
Sure, all of the spoofed spam emails will get through, but for me these are usually less than 5% of all my spam email that I receive. At least this way it will get rid of all of the spam containing OEM software specials, viagra and ways to increase your body parts.
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