The Internet's Bad Neighborhoods

An anonymous reader writes "Of the 42,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) surveyed, just 20 were found to be responsible for nearly half of all the spamming IP addresses — and some ISPs have more than 60% of compromised hosts, mostly in Asia. Phishing Bad Neighborhoods, on the other hand, are mostly in the U.S. Also, there is a silent ticking 'spam' bomb in BRIC countries: if India would have the same Internet penetration rate as the United States while keeping its current ratio of malicious IP addresses, we would observe 200% more spamming IP addresses worldwide. These are just few of the striking results of an extensive study from the University of Twente, in The Netherlands, which scrutinizes the Internet Bad Neighborhoods to develop next-generation algorithms and solutions to better secure networks."

Those aren't the phishers you're looking for

[Animats]

Those aren't the phishers you're really worried about. There seem to be about ten "usual suspects" we keep seeing on our phishing reports. The low-end ones are trolling for Habbo Hotel accounts. A few notches up are phony logins for bank accounts (PayPal and HSBC are popular targets. New this week: Swedish tax refunds. And, for some reason, several new phish sites for AOL 9.0 accounts.) We track these, but they're more of a nuisance than a real threat.

The ones to worry about are better targeted and are of better quality. Those are aimed at corporate login info. Those won't be seen by broad-based phishing detection services because they're only sent to people who might have those logins. So they tend not to be blacklisted.

Re:The Internets "real" bad neighborhoods:

[Anonymous Coward]

How is Al-Jazeera a bad neighbourhood? I found them to be a useful source during the Egyptian revolution, it is a western-style news channel from Arabia. Just because they have been sent tapes from terrorists does not mean that they support them, just as the guardian getting leaks from wikileaks does not mean that they support wikileaks.