A new mail spam report from Commtouch (CTCH) says China is a top location for zombie IP addresses.
The "2008 Email Threats Trend Report" is based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages and covers the third quarter of 2008. Spam levels throughout the third quarter averaged 77% around the world, as in the previous quarter, ranging from a low of 61% to a peak of 94% of all email. Legitimate sites and senders were used by spammers to cloak their illicit activity, and over half of zombies and bots change their IP address daily.
Germany has the fastest rate of zombie IP address turnover, at approximately 79% per day, and China is a close second at 78% turnover per day. New spam tactics during the quarter included links to Flash files, ASCII art spam, and hidden Bayesian poisoning text combined with HTML tricks.
According to Spamhaus, the world's largest anti-spam open source organization, China ranks second after the United States in the number of open current spam issues. Chunghwa Telecom's Hinet.net in Taiwan also has the dubious distinction of being ranked as Spamhaus' ninth worst Internet service provider in the world for the number of spam complaints originating from that telecom company.