Spam servers in China named and shamed

The Internet Society of China (ISC) has published the IP addresses of over one hundred servers that it says are being used to send unsolicited junk mail across the Internet.

This is the sixth time that the ISC has publicly identified alleged spam servers, and it is part of its ongoing attempts to clamp down on problem of spam. Many of the world's worst spammers are thought to be shifting their operations to China, as Western governments finally begin to face up to the issue.

The ISC blacklist runs to 112 separate IP addresses. The ISC will now monitor each server, and could attempt to close the servers down if the problem hasn't been addressed by the end of October.

Internet service providers could choose to block any mail from these servers.

Steve Linford, a leading anti-spam campaigner, warned back in June that many American spammers are using servers based in China.

Linford told the Openwave Messaging Anti-Abuse conference in London that some 70 percent of spam is sent from China by American spam outfits who are hosting their servers with Chinese ISPs. In many cases the spammers have set up firewalls so that the ISPs can't actually see what's being hosted.

"We keep battling with Chinese ISPs who don't understand what we are complaining about," said Linford, whose organisation run a number of blacklists in an attempt to prevent spammers sending their wares out onto the Web.