I setup a new forum for my cycle club.

Registration is locked down (human question / captcha) to deter bots.

I get probably 2/3 manual/human applications a day hoping I’ll let them in. IP addresses of the applicants always point back to the US.

Surprising. I’d have guessed Africa, China etc. But no. The US.

was a while ago now, but my experience was US as the largest apparent source too.

although on one irc server we did block the entire .fr

and on a US forum that we eventually helped run because the guy didn’t know how the internet worked, they blocked the entire IP address allocation of Europe! “because their logs showed most spam came from Europe” (ie the entire IPV4 range of addresses administered by RIPE)

Why are American spammer names always so irritatingly stupid?

Off the top of my head they all seem to have bland and not quite believable names like Lomas Cuchillo, Sandra Paris, Toro Lucas, Trav Poto, Cara Trevas, Brad Pudley and so on.

He he. If they applied with a good old Fred Smith I’d probably let them in!

they use daft names, spell things wrong and use bad grammer on purpose, so they have a reasonable idea that anyone replying isn’t too switched on.

(See what I did there?)

China currently lead the world in spam emails, shortly followed by the US (when measured purely by overall volume; per capita they don’t even feature in the top 10).

I’d be hard pressed to say offhand what I see most of with spam forum posts on STW, they’re from all over the place (and I don’t always check unless it’s a borderline call). Eastern Europe feels common, along with the US, but taking confirmation bias into account I’m not wholly sure.

Probably using a US based VPN or proxy as they know that forum admins often block their own countrys IP ranges.

General consensus amongst the security community appears to be that most Spam/hackers are US or Eastern Europe based, they simply use poorly defended legacy systems in (IT) developing countries to generate the stuff.

Most of China for example, still uses either XP or China’s dodgy XP ripoff. Very easy to zombie and built into a net.

Most of the SPAM we get certainly appears to originate from Eastern Asia whereas actual malicious emails containing either viruses (relatively rare) or phishing links (very common), come from and point back to the old Russian federation.