Every city has a “bad neighborhood” — a squalid, dark, depressed area where sullen people are roaming the streets and the unwary stranger can easily be the victim of crime. It turns out that the internet is the same way.
A Dutch researcher tried to determine if there are patterns to the generation of malicious email used in spam, phishing, and other fraudulent scams. It was a huge task, because there are more than 42,000 internet service providers worldwide. The researcher found, surprisingly, that about half of the malicious email that is the bane of modern electronic communications comes from just 20 of the 42,201 internet service providers. The worst “bad neighborhood” was in Nigeria, where 62 percent of the addresses controlled by one network were found to be sending out spam. Other cyberspace skid rows were found in India, Brazil, and Vietnam.
The hope is that the study will allow internet security providers to better understand the sources of malicious email and further refine filters to try to block the efforts of spammers and fraudsters. It’s a worthy goal, but I’m not holding my breath. There have always been people who would rather hoodwink people than earn an honest living, and the internet has provided them with a vast new arena in which to ply their criminal trade. If they can’t use that “bad neighborhood” in Africa, they’ll just find another “bad neighborhood” somewhere else.
Webner House 