Above 100,000 IP Addresses in China’s Spammers Blacklist

China's Internet authorities have released a blacklist containing above 100,000 web addresses used for spam distribution. The purpose of the list available on the Internet is to help out service providers and e-mail recipients in filtering spam, as published by Pcw.co.uk on June 21, 2007.

Various organizations, including Spamhaus - the biggest anti-spam firm across the world, have ranked China as one of the highest producing sources of unsolicited commercial e-mails across the globe. Local and international Internet Service Providers have blamed the country for reacting slowly to the problem of spam and of neglecting spam reports.

According to a representative of Spamhaus, the organization plans to work in close co-operation with the Internet Society of China (ISC) to help the latter in keeping watch over spammers and root out scamming and other threats exploiting Internet users.

As per a recent survey by ISC, spam coming to Chinese inboxes fell to 58.95% in the first quarter of 2007 making a drop of 5.96% in comparison to the same period last year.

Li Hong, deputy secretary general of the ISC said that ten websites had been linked to the blacklist to allow constant updates and stop unsolicited bulk e-mails. The blacklisted websites include Sina.com, Tom.com, 263, Netease, net.cn, Sohu.com, and Yahoo.com among others, as per the new reported by Pcw.co.uk on June 21, 2007.

According to Zhao Zhinguo, deputy director of the telecom unit under the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry, the recent blacklist has been prepared from IP addresses that the public had submitted. The list contains local as well as global IP addresses, Zhinguo told Xinhua Agency - the news agency under the control of Chinese government.

The ISC has ordered operators of about 900 local IP addresses to stop distributing spam by July 18 this year or face any consequences.

The Chinese Ministry of Information Industry is also thinking of outlining a whitelist of legitimate e-mail senders.

Meanwhile security company Sophos has said that there has been a reduction in spam being relayed through Chinese sources earlier in 2007 indicating the effective results of anti-spam efforts of the government.

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» SPAMfighter News - 7/4/2007