The Spamhaus Project, an international spam monitoring and tracking organisation, has issued a damning report on the world’s top 10 worst internet service providers (ISPs).
The report listed Verizon.com as number 5. Verizon in its news release last 11 August announced that is the “highest-ranked U.S.-based telecommunications company” in ethical ranking based on study by a Geneva-based research firm that tracks the reputations of multinational corporations.
The Spamhaus list is based on the number of current known spam issues relating to poor abuse control by the ISPs over spamming.
According to Spamhaus, the internet is continued to be plagued by spam because a small number of large ISPs “sell service knowingly to professional spammers for profit, or do nothing to prevent spammers operating from their networks.”
The 10 worst ISPs as at 17 February 2010 are:
1. TELEFONICA.COM.AR
2. OVH.NET
3. X0.COM
4. ONO.COM
5. VERIZON.COM
6. TELECOM.COM.AR
7. INTEGRATELECOM.COM
8. INTERBUSINESS.IT
9. GNAX.NET
10. HINET.NET
“Although all networks claim to be anti-spam, some network executives factor revenue made from hosting known spam gangs into corporate policy decisions to continue to sell services to spam operations,” Spamhaus said.
“The majority of the world’s service providers succeed in keeping spammers off their networks and work to maintain a positive anti-spam reputation, but their work is undermined daily by the few networks who, out of corporate greed or mismanagement, choose to be part of the problem.”
World’s top 130 spam operators
In a related page in its website, Spamhaus has also listed the top 130 known spam operators that are responsible for 80 per-cent of the world’s spam.
According to a Spamhaus study, the majority of the spammers move from network to network and country to country seeking out Internet Service Providers with poor security or known for not enforcing anti-spam policies.
Some are even ISPs themselves, Spamhaus reported.
The 130 spam operations are spread over at least 17 countries.
The United States and Canada are reported to be host of 74 and 8 known spam operations, respectively.
Australia has two spam operators identified by Spamhaus as Mike Van Essen/Global Web Promotions and Nikhil Kuman Pragji/Dark-Mailer who is regarded by Spamhaus as the world’s number 10 spammer.
The other countries reported to be hosts of spam operations are Russia, Ukraine, India, Japan, Italy, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Columbia, Guatemala, Estonia, and Romania.
I gave up worrying about Spamhaus’s private feud with Verizon. It seems no matter what, they will manage to keep Verizon in their top ten list by keeping stale issues on the list or counting the same issue multiple times. (Right now they’re tied for 9th-10th with 34 issues.) If you look at the actual volume of spam arriving in your inbox, Verizon has very little to do with it. They are even underrepresented in customers’ pwned computers participating in botnets.
But they host Gevalia coffee, division of Kraft Foods, a company which ought to know better than to spam the way they do. Spamhaus REEEALLY hates Gevalia, and are counting them four times on that list of 34 items, even though Glavmed/Spamit/Canadian Pharmacy by the same standards would be counted about 50 gazillion times. They aren’t going to let Verizon off the hook unless they completely boot Kraft Foods’ website off their network. Kraft is a huge account, so that isn’t going to happen if they aren’t doing something pretty bad. Gevalia spams, but they will unsubscribe people, so they are operating within the law in the the US.
We had a discussion about this a while ago on the inboxrevenge.com forum. I researched the issues that had put Verizon on their list at that time. One was a domain which had been terminated by its registrar over a year earlier and which was hosted on the hijacked server of a Verizon customer. That customer had apparently gotten the trojan off their box, because it had not been observed hosting any more of the domains of that spam brand during several months of observations that we had been making as part of the former Castlecops.com SIRT program. What else was Verizon supposed to do to get that item off the list? And there were similar issues with several other items. Were they dealt with more accurately, Verizon would have fallen off the top ten list.
The discussion thread with the details is here
Thanks for dropping by.
Based on snapshot observations, Spamhaus had listed Verizon in its Top 10 worst ISPs as follows: 8 May 2009: Verizon ranked number 6 with 28 issues; 24 Sept 2009: Verizon was *** not *** listed in the Top 10 Worst ISPs; 17 Feb 2010: Verizon ranked number 5 with 41 issues; 1 April 2010: Verizon ranked number 10 with 34 issues.