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Swiss Slammed By Lots Of Spam
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-07-11
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Inboxes in the tiny European country picked up far more spam than anywhere else in the world during the month of June.
 | | Swiss Slammed By Lots Of Spam |  |
Pity Switzerland. The nation experienced so much spam circulating that exceeded usual list topper Hong Kong for the ignominious honor of most spammed country last month.
Security vendor MessageLabs said in its monthly report spam overall decreased 0.3 percent from May to June, to account for 76.5 percent of emails.
Some countries saw higher ratios of spam to legitimate messages. Switzerland's uncomfortable percentage of spam out of all email hit 84.8 percent. Hong Kong, France, Israel, and Austria followed in that list.
Those countries made the US spam level of 68.8 percent in June look virtually manageable. Australia fared better at 66.9 percent, while Canada experienced 77.8 percent and the UK 74.3 percent.
Political and celebrity topics continued to prove popular with spammers in June. Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign probably did not enjoy seeing spam titled "Scandal rocks Obama as lurid sex video leaked!' making the rounds.
That and similar spam alluding to illicit videos featuring Brad Pitt, Christina Aguilera, and Scarlett Johansson led people to a malicious file, video.exe, hosted on a compromised domain.
MessageLabs said the file resides on a page linked from the spam; the visitor is prompted to grab the ActiveX control to view the video, but instead ends up with malware related to the Storm botnet.
View All Articles by David Utter
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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