A new study from CipherTrust gives new support to the theory that spam could be greatly reduced by finding, and jailing, a few hundred Americans. (Picture from USA Today.)

Gregg Keizer writes for Information Week that, rather than put up a "honeypot" aimed at attracting spam, CipherTrust measured the actual spam it intercepted for its clients.

Dmitri Alperovitch, a research engineer at CipherTrust, explained that "some spammers are actually targeting specific companies with messages that the honey pots wouldn't see."

CipherTrust's study concluded that 86% of the world's spam originates from within the U.S., and that all those Korean, Chinese et. al. addresses are just being spoofed.

"The bulk of U.S. spam is coming from a very limited set of IPs with high-bandwidth connections," said Alperovitch, who estimated that the high-volume spamming addresses number fewer than 10,000 and the number of spammers at less than 200.

Less than 200. Find and jail fewer than 200 U.S.-based spam kings and the problem will start to go away. You can argue that killing those will merely cause others to rise, but that's an argument against drugs, not spam.