Despite Beijing's Net Censorship, The Country Appears To Be Playing Host
To Thousands Of The Sites Spammers Want You To Visit
Subscribe to BusinessWeekThe U.S. has no shortage of people looking to
blame China for America's economic problems. The flight of manufacturing
jobs is China's fault. Who's to blame for the deflationary pressure that
prevents companies from raising prices? China. Now that deflation
worries are giving way and the U.S. economy is picking up steam while
China runs the risk of overheating, who's to blame for inflationary
pressures? One guess.
The China critics surely aren't always right, but they have a point.
Beijing certainly has a much greater impact on the U.S. economy now that
China is a growing power. But Gideon Mantel, the head of an Israeli
company that tracks e-mail traffic, says China is also a major source
for another American ailment -- spam. Not the meat, of course, but
unwanted, aggravating e-mail. The majority of those messages telling you
how to increase your penis size or get a discount mortgage or get rich
on eBay are trying to get you to visit Web sites based in China.
Mantel is CEO of Commtouch Software (CTCH), a Nasdaq-listed company with
offices in Silicon Valley as well as the Israeli city of Netanya, about
midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa.
"AMAZING" NUMBERS.Commtouch helps companies filter spam messages from
the e-mail accounts of their employees. It's hard work, given the size
of the spamming epidemic. "We're talking now about 350,000 to 400,000
unique spam attacks a day," says Mantel. He defines a "unique spam
attack" as one that goes to at least 50,000 recipients. The problem is
getting worse and worse, he adds. "Since Jan. 1, we've seen probably a
30% to 40% increase" in spam traffic, Mantel says.
About a year-and-a-half ago, Mantel and his colleagues decided they
wanted to learn more about all the spam people were getting. About a
dozen Commtouch employees began a project, which tries to trace the
location of destination sites advertised in spam. They surveyed 300,000
sites in spam messages and found that 71% of the Internet protocol (IP)
addresses for them were based in China.
"The numbers are amazing," says Mantel. "When we saw them, I was so
shocked, we checked and rechecked the numbers three times." The
Commtouch team looked at the URLs embedded in the spam messages and then
checked the IP addresses that those URLs pointed to -- and they clearly
were Chinese.
MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS. He explains how it works. "Suppose you have a sex
site, and you want to advertise it. You send a spam that says 'Come and
see XYZ on this URL.' The host computer of this URL is based in China."
Mantel isn't saying that the spammers themselves are Chinese. Chances
are, they're probably American or European. But whoever they are,
they're finding China to be a convenient base to host their Web sites
from.
"Maybe there's a redirect -- I don't know," Mantel says. "Maybe the host
computer in China is sending [user traffic] to Korea, or somewhere else,
to confuse law enforcement." But there's no doubt in his mind about the
location of that first link. "The host computer is Chinese," he says.
It's not hard to identify an IP address as Chinese, he adds, since every
one has about 10 digits and the first two or three are the indicator of
the country.
How could this be? After all, China is notorious for its Internet
censorship efforts, and Beijing doesn't take kindly to pornography of
any sort. Mantel says the Commtouch people had a hard time making sense
of the figures. "We started to scratch our heads. We said 'wow, that's
an amazing number.'" One thing that's particularly odd: While China is
the host of so many sites promoted in spam, the spam e-mails themselves
aren't coming from China.
"NOT NORMAL." Mantel says the spammers are sophisticated enough that
they know how to hide the origin of an e-mail. And since many filters
identify messages as spam if they come from addresses that already have
sent similar junk mail, the same spam is being sent simultaneously from
hundreds of IPs.
Site hosting is different, however. It doesn't jump around. And while
Beijing has strong anti-porn policies, the economics of Web hosting work
in favor of the spammers. It's inexpensive to host a Web site in China,
and it just makes sense to operate from there, regardless of whether
it's strictly legal. Moreover, as Net usage soars in China -- it's now
the world's second-largest Internet country after the U.S. -- the
government has a harder time keeping control of everything, Mantel
points out.
Now that the survey is done and Commtouch has fingered China as a major
problem area, Mantel is trying to win business helping companies fight
the spam. He hopes to announce some deals in the months ahead. For the
meantime, though, add him to the list of people surprised by the growing
clout of China. The 71% figure "is an amazing number," he says. "If it
were 5%, 6%, 7%, you would say that it's normal. This is not normal
behavior."
When it comes to China, extraordinary is the norm.

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