FW: e-bay

Fri Sep 26 19:01:14 UTC 2003

On Friday, Sep 26, 2003, at 14:06 Canada/Eastern, Mike Tancsa wrote:

> But 3 days later, I got another email with the same scam, this time to 
> a different provider in Korea.... Next.

Korea has a very large number of reliably- and permanently-connected 
windows boxes in comparison to most other countries (the OECD numbers 
on broadband access in 2001 ranked Korea way up there at the top of the 
list, with Canada a distant second, or so I heard on the radio the 
other day). You can buy residential 20Mbit/s VDSL services there over 
the phone, as a regular service, and people do.

Given this, I'm guessing that if you choose a windows box with a stable 
connection on the net at random, chances are good that it's in Korea.

All the network operators I have in Korea are both efficient and 
technically proficient, and I certainly didn't get any impression that 
people were lax or in any way irresponsible with respect to running 
networks: the fact that the networks there are still functioning at all 
suggests they are well-practiced at dealing with infected windows 
boxes. It's seems to be much less common to find people who speak 
English in Korea than it is in other places in Asia, though, which 
might help explain apparent unresponsiveness to complaints which are 
not written in Korean.

So, here's my point (and I know I'm rambling, come on, it's a Friday): 
when every other back trace leads to Korea, it's not necessarily 
because Korea is irresponsible or incompetent; in terms of the global 
distribution of windows-based worm factories, they just account for a 
disproportionate amount of the Internet.

Given the numbers of clients they have to deal with it's eminently 
possible that they're doing a much better job, in relative and general 
terms, than operators in the US, Europe and Australasia.

Joe