How much is junk traffic costing you?

...the Caribbean), and RIPE (Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Northern Africa) network information. That's when some interesting statistics began to emerge.

Statistically, the majority of junk IP addresses came from inside the United States, which isn't surprising. There are millions of Trojaned Windows systems on the Internet — especially on broadband networks — and the majority of these systems are in the United States. Hackers worldwide regularly organise large numbers of compromised Windows systems into "botnets" and use them for massive DoS attacks or other nefarious activities.

Second on the list for junk Internet traffic was China. This is somewhat ironic given the country's strict controls on Internet usage and the millions of dollars spent on the "Great Firewall of China".

It's a good bet, however, that China is more concerned about what's coming into the country via the Internet than what's going out — and that's probably why so many junk email organisations use Internet services in China. Anyone with a spam-trap email account can easily confirm that China is a major source of spam.

If someone wants to send junk email, there are plenty of places in China to send it from, and many spam reporting services can confirm this. In any case, the fact that so many China-delegated IP addresses scanned for SMTP and various TCP proxy services made it number two on my junk list.

Rounding out the top five on my list of junk Internet traffic sources were France, Belgium, and Germany. The remaining individual countries didn't make the bell curve for the top five, so I simply summed their totals.

Based on the total amount of incoming data for the 30 days in question, my report showed that approximately 7 percent of all incoming Internet traffic to my organisation's network fell under the junk traffic classification. Estimating the cost for bandwidth at about $50 per megabit per second, the junk traffic costs my organisation about $255 per month — or about $3,060 annually — that's about £1,760.

However, when compared to our total bandwidth costs, this amount is pretty inconsequential — and not worth doing anything about. The effort required to contact the people who manage the networks the junk comes from just wouldn't justify the expense, and most of them probably wouldn't do anything about the problem anyway. So, like many other Internet problems, the best solution to dealing with junk Internet traffic is to do nothing at all.