Fighting Spam to Build Trust
on May 27, 2011
The EastWest Institute and the Internet Society of China convened a team of China-U.S. experts for an ongoing bilateral dialogue on cybersecurity issues. This report, the first from the team, represents the first effort by Chinese and U.S. experts to work together on a major cyberspace challenge. The results are strong joint recommendations for fighting spam—an underrated problem in cyberspace. Spam, which comprises as much as ninety percent of all email messages carried in networks, irritates end-users, clogs networks, and carries the malicious codes used by hackers for fraud and other crimes. To fight spam, the experts made two key recommendations: first, the creation of an international forum to deal with spam; second, that network operators, Internet service providers, and email providers follow forty-six mutually-agreed upon best practices. Those best practices include the creation of international protocols to weed out spam from legitimate messages; consumer education about botnets; and that ISPs in both countries use feedback loops to discourage spam.
