A new report from the Cloudmark security company has two big takeaways. First, that spam comes in waves, playing off popular terms that will appeal to victims. Second, that more than a quarter of Belarus' total IP space has been blocked for sending out spam. Wow.
Belarus Bombed by Spam
Let's work through that Belarus figure because not only is it a bit complicated, it also exposes how spammers operate. According to Cloudmark's report, the company is blocking 27.4 percent of Belarus's total IP address space. The former longtime record holder for percentage of IP addresses blocked is Romania, which currently has 22.3 percent of its total IP space blocked by Cloudmark.
That sounds like a lot, and it is, but Cloudmark researcher Andrew Conway broke down what these numbers really mean. He explained that IP addresses are assigned differently country-by-country. "The US has been allocated five IP addresses per person, where as Nigeria has one address for every 120 people," he went on to explain that each IP address can be further split using different translation processes.
When you look at the actual number of IP addresses blocked, you see that Belarus is almost tied with the U.S., both hovering around three million sites. By comparison, only 0.2 percent of US addresses are being blocked. This means that Belarus has far fewer IP addresses assigned to it than the US, but that a hefty portion of them are being used by spammers.
Also interesting is how Belarus burst onto the spam scene only recently. In January of 2013 only about five percent of the country's IP addresses were blocked for sending spam. That number shot up over the course of just a few months as spammers moved their operations to Belarus hosting services, peaking in May of 2013 at just under 30 percent.
"We were blocking so much of Romania that spammers started moving to Belarus and Russia," explained Conway. "Spammers will follow the path of least resistance."
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