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US Slithers Atop Spam Producing Heap
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-11-08
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The United States again took the dubious honor of being the worst spam relaying country in the world, with over 300 versions of the Stratio worm emerging in the third quarter helping things along.
 | | "We're Number 1!" |  |
For the period of July through September 2006, security software firm Sophos found that a third of the world's spam came from two countries - the US and China. US-generated spam accounted for 21.6 percent of the junk cramming itself into inboxes around the world.
China, including Hong Kong, accounted for 13.4 percent of the spam problem for the period. France and South Korea were equal opportunity offenders at 6.3 percent each. Spain, Poland, and Brazil followed them.
Those stock scams where the spammers hope to pump and dump a chosen stock have been the choice of scammers everywhere, especially as they turn to image-based messages. Sophos noted that spam with embedded images accounted for nearly 40 percent of the spam seen during the period.
The use of images, particularly those with animated GIFs or using multiple layers of images, has cropped up in response to spam filtering measures aimed at reducing the junk that reaches the inbox. Methods like Bayesian filtering look at the text of a message, not the pictures, and let that spam pass through.
"Most unsolicited emails are now sent from zombie PCs," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos. "Hundreds of new versions of the Stratio worm have helped steadily increase the volume of spam seen traveling across the net."
Converting PCs into spam-spewing zombies has been the focus of malware creators. Once a machine has been compromised, it can be used to forward thousands of messages. These relays make it more difficult to track down the originator of the spam.
Efforts to detect and shut down such zombies will require greater efforts from the Internet service providers through whose networks the spam from those cracked machines travels. Until that happens the problem will continue to persist.
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Tag: Spam
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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