I hate spam. Everyone does. As if email wasn’t good enough, spammers have also been trying to exploit my blog ever since I started blogging. Luckily, I have a very good Bayesian spam filter called Akismet in place, that filters out all comment spam from my blog. The best part is that I don’t have to use annoying “CAPTCHA” tests like images to distinguish valid comments from spam.
Anyway, since I was taking a break, I decided to analyze where all the spam was coming from. I looked up the IP address ranges of spammers (a day’s worth), and found them to be allocated by the RIPE NCC, that handles the Regional Internet Registry for ISPs and companies located in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia.
ALL the ranges resolved to a company in Russia called “IN-Telecom Limited”. They have a website at in-telecom.ru, that surprisingly is “under construction”, and has the ICQ contact of someone.
Here’s the RIPE Whois record:
netname: IN-TELECOM descr: IN-Telecom Limited - IT-service corporation descr: http://ServerBox.ru - Dedicated Servers, Collocation descr: http://NODEK.ru - Quality web-hosting, domain registration descr: http:// Domingo.ru - Web-solitions studio country: RU admin-c: NIL8-RIPE tech-c: NIL8-RIPE status: ASSIGNED PAmnt-by: AS8342-MNT source: RIPE # Filtered
person: Natalya I Lisnyak address: IN-Telecom Limited address: Dekabristov str., 10-72 address: 614022 Perm address: Russia phone: +7 3422 774365 fax-no: +7 3422 931076 nic-hdl: NIL8-RIPE source: RIPE # Filtered abuse-mailbox: info@in-telecom.ru abuse-mailbox: info@in-telecom.ru abuse-mailbox: info@in-telecom.ru
When will spammers learn that no sane person is going to fall into their trap?