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About forty-five percent of the spam sent out to infest inboxes worldwide comes from a US-based machine.
Bot-infested PCs throughout the United States are responsible for the continuous flood of spam hitting email users everywhere. Even with the rise in spam coming from China, Russia, and Brazil, none are close to matching what comes out of American computers.
Part of Symantec's recent Internet Threat Report covered the spam issue, and a company security researcher discussed the spam aspect on Symantec's Security Response blog. Nick Sullivan wrote that the US exceeds China by a seven to one margin in spam sent.
Continued and persistent unsafe practices by Internet users have likely made the spam trade much more appealing to spammers. The US has had the largest Internet userbase for years, and every time someone clicks on a link, runs an attachment, or otherwise visits an unsafe website, the likelihood of a PC becoming a spam zombie increases.
Criminals love these proxy servers, which help conceal their tracks. They can dump millions of messages on people, and if only a few credulous people take them up on their offers, or run malware that can steal financial logins from systems, the thieves win every single time.
Sullivan talked about the disparity between US-
originated spam and that from other countries in his
post:
Compared to the much larger proportion of spam received from the United States, this can mean one of two things: spam zombies in the United States are being used to send exceptionally large volumes of spam compared to spam zombies in other countries, or that more spam from the United States is sent through ISPs and other sources than directly from spam zombies in the United States.
Since many of the countries with many spam zombies have high broadband penetration (Germany and France, for instance), it is not likely that spammers are able to get a higher throughput of spam from American computers, especially since these countries are the source of much less spam than the United States.
The most likely explanation is that spammers are more likely to use ISPs or free email addresses in the United States to send their spam.
Getting a machine to be a spam zombie, and having it remain one, has to be blamed first and foremost on the spammers. But the computer users who don't run security applications or persist in risky behavior have to account for some of the blame as well.
About
the Author:
David Utter is a technology writer for SecurityProNews, WebProNews, and InternetFinancialNews.
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