Tag Archives: reputation

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.

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Davos discovers cyber attacks

Cyber attacks made the Davos Top 5 Global Risks in Terms of Likelihood. Davos, the annual conclave of the hyper-rich and famously elected, has also discovered Severe income disparity and Water supply crisis, so maybe they’re becoming more realistic.

However, in Figure 17 on page 25 they’ve got Cyber attacks as an origin risk, along with Massive incident of data fraud or theft and Massive digital misinformation. I think they’re missing the point, which is the real origin risk is poor infosec, and the origin of that is vendors like MSFT knowingly shipping systems with design flaws and people and organizations running them while hiding such problems.

Interesting comment on page 26: Continue reading →

India, Bank of America, and CyberSURF: December 2011 SpamRankings.net

In SpamRankings.net for December 2011, worldwide India spammed the most, while Bank of America topped one U.S. ranking, and CyberSURF peaked in Canada, but Cleveland Clinic cleaned up its act.

More on those and other interesting rankings in later posts.

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Coal company reputation

Good news from the SEC for a change! They’re requiring coal plant operators to report health and safety violations, including fatalities, within a few days of occurence.

FuelFix posted from AP on 23 December 2011, SEC requiring coal firms to report safety problems

Earlier this week, the SEC announced new rules that require mining companies to start reporting any fatalities and all major health and safety violations, mine by mine, in their quarterly and annual financial reports. The filings are mandated in the wide-ranging Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed to try to increase corporate accountability.

The rules take effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. They require companies to report within four days any “significant and substantial” violations, citations, flagrant violations and imminent-danger orders issued by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Coal operators must also include the dollar value of proposed fines, whether the company has been or may be designated a pattern violator by MSHA, and any pending cases with the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.

What problem does this reporting solve? As the article points out: Continue reading →

Comcast pushed out of first, yet wins November U.S. SpamRankings.net

How can an ISP both lose and win in top 10 rankings? By placing more than once!

Comcast got pushed out of first place by AS 46475 LIMESTONENETWORKS and AS 21788 NOC in the November 2011 Monthly U.S. SpamRankings.net from CBL volume. AS 20214 COMCAST-20214 did spam a third less (1,503,173 spam messages) than last month (2,193,898), but it was the spontaneous spam spewing of the two top place newcomers that pushed it down to third place.

Yet Comcast really won the month. It took 4 of the top 10 (places 3, 6, 7, and 10), which is twice as many as last time, and accounted for 30.29% of top 10 spam spewed, up from 23.9% last time. That percentage beats either of the top two this time.

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World PM2.5 Map as reputation

NASA posted 22 October 2009, New Map Offers a Global View of Health-Sapping Air Pollution
In many developing countries, the absence of surface-based air pollution sensors makes it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to get even a rough estimate of the abundance of a subcategory of airborne particles that epidemiologists suspect contributes to millions of premature deaths each year. The problematic particles, called fine particulate matter (PM2.5), are 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, about a tenth the fraction of human hair. These small particles can get past the body’s normal defenses and penetrate deep into the lungs.
Even satellite measurements are difficult (clouds, snow, sand, elevation, etc.). But not impossible:

Continue reading →

Air reputation in Beijing

Measuring something as basic as air quality and posting it frequently can have reputational effects, demonstrated by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

France24 posted today, Beijing air goes from ‘hazardous’ to off the charts, literally,

Two years ago, Chinese officials asked the US Embassy to stop tweeting about pollution in Beijing on the grounds that the information was “confusing” and could have “social consequences”, according to a confidential US State Department cable made public by WikiLeaks.
Hm, so measurement can affect reputation and have social consequences….

The measurements postings didn’t stop, and the pollution got worse: Continue reading →

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.

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China does not lead Country Rankings from SpamRankings.net

An area where China does not lead the world: Country rankings by SpamRankings.net. China is only #13, but Brazil, Russia, and India (the other three BRICs) are in the top five countries by total spam messages for October 2011. U.S. is #10.

Vietnam came from behind a few months ago to place second for October.

Brazil had slumped as low as #6 in July, but has pulled back up into the leading pack.

After the top five, it’s a long-tail distribution indeed. Continue reading →

What is IPWORLDNET and why is it spamming from Canada?

In the October SpamRankings.net for Canada (from CBL data), IPWORLDNET is that big blue molar tooth in the graph on the right. In the interactive chart you can see IPWORLDNET’s Autonomous System (AS) 19875 winning the month with two bursts of spam, and then dropping almost to zero.

That’s not the only spamming churn activity in Canada for October. The log chart shows MetroBridge Networks Corporation AS 25976 METROBRIDGE-NET jumping up from zero to take ninth place. It looks like one organization may have cleaned up its act while another got infested.

Last month’s winner, Canaca-com’s AS 33139 CANACA-210, came in second. From there down it’s mostly the usual suspects in slightly different orders. Interestingly, longterm winner Bell Canada’s AS 577 BACOM only came in fourth. This is unusual for a national telco. Maybe they’re watching the rankings?

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