Tag Archives: ranking

Big U.S. Spam Spike in February 2012 SpamRankings.net

What could push the U.S. from 13 to 2 in worldwide SpamRankings.net, and way up to number one for the last week of February 2012?

In the U.S. rankings by ASN, seven out of ten are new, and NOC number 1 came up from number 9. Something pretty bad is going on. So bad Comcast didn’t place in the top 10 at all, for the first time in recent memory!

NOC has had this problem before, in July and November 2011, but never with this amount of spam volume. And this time many other ASNs show the same pattern.

The same issue may be in the Canadian rankings as well: AS 32613 IWEB-AS jumped from 8 to 1 for the month, with almost all the increase in the same last week of the month as for the U.S. problem ASNs.

There was even a similar curve in the World rankings, for Telefonica del Peru’s AS 6147 SAA.

Our next step is to drill down to see if these ASNs were infected by the same botnet. We did that for the medical ASNs last month, but this is a much bigger spam event this month.

-jsq

Cleveland Clinic spewing spam again

Here’s why to look at more than one spam data source: according to the PSBL volume data for November 2011, Cleveland Clinic’s AS 22093 CCF-NETWORK spewed more than a hundred spam messages a day on multiple days, while CBL volume data showed Cleveland Clinic with only 42 spam messages for the entire month. Apparently PSBL’s spamtraps happened to be in the path of this CCF spam.

Now a couple of hundred spam messages a day isn’t much by world organization standards, but compared to what we’d all like to see from medical organizations (zero), it’s a lot.

Also compared to the other medical institutions in the same rankings from the same data, the pie chart looks like Pac Man and the bar graph looks like a hockey stick.

Maybe Cleveland Clinic didn’t get the memo after all.

-jsq

Massive effects of reputational rankings on law schools

Law schools game weak reputation rankings, which could be fixed, if the law schools, the bar association, or the ranking organization wanted to. If anyone doubts that reputational rankings can have massive effects on ranked organizations, read this.

David Segal wrote in the NYTimes 30 April 2011, Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win:

How hard could a 3.0 be? Really hard, it turned out. That might have been obvious if Golden Gate published a statistic that law schools are loath to share: the number of first-year students who lose their merit scholarships. That figure is not in the literature sent to prospective Golden Gate students or on its Web site.
…
Why would a school offer more scholarships than it planned to renew?

The short answer is this: to build the best class that money can buy, and with it, prestige. But these grant programs often succeed at the expense of students, who in many cases figure out the perils of the merit scholarship game far too late.

What makes law school rankings so easy to game? Continue reading →

Transparency in Rome

Here’s my presentation, Transparency as Incentive for Internet Security: Organizational Layers for Reputation, from RIPE 61 in Rome. This presentation summarizes the two previous RIPE Labs papers about proposed new organizational layers and outbound spam ranking experiments.

RIPE-NCC is the oldest of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), and RIPE is the deliberately unorganized association of interested parties that meets twice a year and holds discussions online in between. It’s a mix of operations, research, and socializing. Topics range from obscure details of deploying IPv6 to organizational proposals such as what I was talking about. 430 people attended the meeting in Rome, which was quite a few more than the dozen or two of the first RIPE meeting I went to many years ago.

Interesting questions were asked. I may blog some of them.

-jsq