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more on Why the future is in South Korea
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 10:37:06 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com> Date: June 11, 2006 10:16:47 AM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] more on Why the future is in South Korea
But the most popular services are homegrown.
I'm not surprised, since South Korea has made itself into a thoroughly unpleasant net neighbor. When they wired up the country, they gave no apparent thought to security. You could tell each time a new school came online because it had a server with the same unpatched version of Windows which was taken over by worms in about 15 minutes and started spewing spam and worse. They compounded the damage with an ill-considered spam law that made spam legal so long as the subject line had the Korean equivalent of ADV:, so the blast of illegally relayed foreign spam was soon joined by an equal blast of home-grown spam. Complaining about the spam was useless for a combination of reasons: the nominal managers of most of the computers were completely untrained, they usually had no language in common with the recipients of the spam their networks were sending, and the sheer volume of spam was so huge that even the few competent ones were overwhelmed. Several years ago I got so tired of Korean spam that I got the list of IP ranges assigned to Korea and set up a DNSBL for my own use called korea.services.net. Despite having no publicity other than word of mouth, it's now used by mail admins around the world and fields hundreds of queries a second. I keep statistics, and will remove networks on request if it's not seeing spam from them, but I have only removed a few small industrial and education networks and the big ones, most notably the national phone company's Kornet just blast away. Now and then someone writes and says "how dare you block our whole network, it's a gross overreaction." I write back and say "what would you do if a network were sending a thousand spams for every real message? That's what I did." The government changed the spam law to be reasonable, and I have talked to people from the Korean government who are trying to deal with their network security problems, but they have an impossible task. I gather that most people in Korea consider e-mail to be useless, and if they use it at all, they discard an address after a month or two because of the spam load. I don't follow other security issues as closely, but I see a lot of Korean addresses wherever trouble arises. So it's true, wiring up the entire country that fast was a technical tour de force, but before you wish for your own country to do the same thing, be sure you understand what you're asking for. R's, John ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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