Spam Turkey – Not as tasty as you might think.
Back in 2002, the individuals behind Clueless Mailers distributed a massive diagram that illustrated just how endemic the problem of spam really is. For the first time, you could actually see how various networks connected and collaborated with one another across the globe, to ensure that you had an endless supply of messages in your inbox promising you untold Nigerian fortunes and more manhood than you can shake a stick at… so to speak.
Click to check out the full version of the map
Well, there’s now an updated version that you can access at Spamworld which uses the Google Maps API to track known IPs of networks that contribute to spam traffic on the Internet, in real time (There are other lists out there, but it’s difficult to glean where their numbers are coming from). Looking at the map, it’s not that surprising to see a large number of spam coming from Asia. Which is not to say that the Asian populace is being shady on purpose. It’s merely that there are a lot more people there, and hence the opportunity to set up a relevant infrastructure is that much higher. Almost 2300 IPs carry spam traffic from Turkey, which is almost equivalent to the number from China. Equally strange is the absence of information out there that attempts to explain why.
Perhaps there a lot of server clusters in Turkey that are unwittingly being used by bots and other computer networks as a relay point for spam from elsewhere. Perhaps it’s a viable economic venture for a small group of people in Turkey that have figured out how to exploit the system. Who knows for sure?
But it gets a little weirder than that. Try doing a Google Search for TurkTelecom (Search for “TTnet” – I’ll leave the actual URL off of here) and see what happens. On the first page of results you get links for:
- A Chinese Parts Manufacturer
- A forum about the Nissan Twin Turbo
- A few Training Networks
- An Internet Services Company that has a rock band … or something
- A Textile Company
- The Mongolian Embassy (which,… strangely is linked from the proper TTnet parent domain)
It’s only when you get to page 2 that you actually hit anything that resembles the TTnet site. You’ll also find the Wikipedia entry for the site, which is an orphaned article that has very little info. It has an Alexa rating below the 5000 mark, making it one of the top 5000 visited sites in the world (to put this into perspective, a site like Wired.com falls just over the 1000 mark, whereas McDonalds.com is over the 8000 mark).
It’s an interesting little paradox. This prolific hermit of a entity phases in and out of existence depending on how you look at it.