Researchers at the University of Alabama say almost all of the websites advertised through spam are hosted in China on servers protected by bulletproof hosting. That means that the ISPs who provide hosting to spammers and malicious domains simply don’t care and ignore abuse complaints and take down orders.

The researchers reviewed millions of spam message and found that over 69,000 unique domains hosted the websites found in the spams and of those, 70% were located in China, making it a definite spam haven.

“It is very normal that more than one-third of the domain names we see each day in spam messages come from China,” wrote Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the university. “When one also considers the many ‘.com’ and ‘.ru’ domain names which are also hosted in China, the problem is much worse.”

The so-called bulletproof providers actively recruit spammers and cybercriminals, going as far as to post ads on the underground websites where they are known to socialize. These hosts ignore take down requests and abuse reports and even make IP addresses hard to trace. A Chinese domain name can be had for a mere 15 cents, which only adds to the problem.

The researchers aren’t sure all the providers hosting the spam domains are bulletproof however. They speculate that a few may simply not have the resources or understanding to deal with the problem. Curiously enough, while the Chinese government had made headlines and waves with its increasing attempts to censor the Internet in the name of fighting porn, they have had nothing to say about the spam problem. It’s not known if they are even aware that there is one!