more on Why the future is in South Korea

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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



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