For the longest time my site has been tracked and spammed by 163data.com.cn. I, and others, have wondered about the story behind the number 163. Was it a Chinese Army unit number similar to 解放军 61398部隊? Alas, there seems to be nothing so exciting. There are only a few links about the history of 163.
It looks like in the ’90s when you had to dial a telephone number to a modem and reach the internet, 163 was appended to a local number. Thus 163 was commonly used and therefore memorable. After this time NetEase started 163.com and used 163 to start China’s largest free email service, the Chinese equivalent to gmail. 163.com remains very popular in China today.
163data.com.cn is a very prolific content spammer. While they operate out of Chinanet Fujian Province most of the time, they will take IPs from all over China. You can see the province in their ip address. I get spam from them at least every week, and much more if they have a spam campaign.
I have tried banning their host name but this does not work. You need to ban by IP address, unfortunately.
