A study by the University of Twente’s Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) focused on “Bad Neighbourhoods” on the internet. The study’s author Giovane Moura claimed that like in the real world, the internet has also “bad neighbourhoods” whose streets are not safe and where crime rates are higher than in other districts.
Moura has carried out the first systematic investigation of malicious hosts, by monitoring and analysing network data. He worked out that malicious activity is indeed concentrated in limited zones. In those regions IP addresses show strong similarities, per ISP, or even per country.
At one ISP more than 62 per cent of the addresses were related to spam. Spam comes mainly from southern Asian countries, while phishing occurs primarily in the United States and other developed countries. This is because phishing requires data centres and cloud computing providers.
Nuke bad neighbourhoods from space
Of the 42,000 Internet Service Providers just 20 were found to be responsible for nearly half of all the internet addresses that send spam.
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Nick Farrell
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