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Only a couple of years back, the United States accounted for more than half of the spam being excreted into people's inboxes, but heightened user awareness of security and the prosecution of large-scale spammers has dropped that number.
The Sophos security firm released some quarterly numbers today. But unlike those disclosed by publicly-traded companies in earnings reports, these reflect the "dirty dozen" countries that spam flows from the most.
A 23.1 percent figure for spam relaying doesn't look real good for the United States. According to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, it's an improvement from previous years. He noted some circumstances that have led to improvement:
"Two years ago, the US accounted for over half of all spam sent to the world - now it is less than a quarter, evidence which confirms that more Americans are waking up to the need to protect their home computers from malicious hackers. More and more viruses, worms and Trojan horses are being designed to take over innocent users' computers with the intention of stealing information and sending out junk email campaigns."
Microsoft probably deserves some credit for the decrease. With the release of the Windows XP operating system, users received a firewall as part of the installation. Given the vast number of home PCs running Windows, that XP firewall probably has helped block a lot of attacks that would have entered PCs in the past.
This is Sophos' list of the top 12 spam relaying countries, by percentage:
| United States |
23.1% |
| China (incl Hong Kong) |
21.9% |
| South Korea |
9.8% |
| France |
4.3% |
| Poland |
3.8% |
| Spain |
3.3% |
| Germany |
3.0% |
| Brazil |
2.9% |
| Japan |
2.0% |
| United Kingdom |
1.9% |
| Netherlands |
1.8% |
| Taiwan |
1.6% |
All other countries added up to 20.6 percent of the spam relaying taking place. Sophos noted that as a continent, Europe may soon over take North America for second place in relaying, following Asia. Some 42.8 percent of spam relaying comes from Asia.
Various cases brought in the US against spammers under the CAN-SPAM Act have helped end spam rings and in some cases recovered damages from the offenders.
A side effect of prosecution, however, has probably caused many operations to slip into other countries with less effective laws or minimal interest in enforcing such laws against spammers.
About
the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer with WebProNews and SecurityProNews. |
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