USA remains 'King of Spam' despite strong Asian competition

Think of spam and chances are your mind immediately turns to China or Russia and messages about sexual dysfunction or a financial deal you cannot believe. Maybe, though, your thoughts should be closer to home. Especially if home is in the United States.

According to the latest research from security specialists Sophos which has just published the quarterly 'Dirty Dozen' league table of spam relaying countries, China doesn't even feature in the list and Russia is only fourth when it comes to those countries relaying, or distributing if you prefer, the most spam. So who is top of this unsavoury list?

Yep, you guessed it, the United States.

Again.

The USA has been the single worst offender when it comes to pushing spam around the planet, although South Korea is catching up with the greatest year on year increase meaning it is now responsible for relaying 9.6 percent of the world's spam. The USA is responsible for 11.3 percent.

If you look at the spam problem from a continental perspective, however, things do improve somewhat for the USA as North America drops to third place behind Asia and Europe. Indeed, North America and Europe together only contribute 35.6 percent of the world's spam content whereas Asia can be thoroughly ashamed of the 50.1 percent it throws around.

To put that into some historical perspective, this time last year Asia was responsible for some 30 percent of global spam whereas Europe contributes 10 percent less than it did during that same period. Asian countries dominate the top ten list, with South Korea, India, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia and Pakistan all playing their part.

The top 12 spam relaying countries for July to September 2011 are as follows:United States (11.3%) S Korea (9.6%) India (8.8%) Russia(7.9%) Brazil (5.7%) Taiwan (3.8%) Vietnam (3.5%) Indonesia (3.3%) Ukraine (3.1%) Romania (2.8%) Pakistan (2.0%) Italy (1.9%) Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, explains "these latest statistics suggest that, as more people get online in Asia, they are not taking the right measures to protect their computers from infection, which results in the growth of botnets. Don't ever be tempted to buy anything via spam, as that's what makes it worthwhile for commercial spammers. The best way for individuals to send a message that spam will not be tolerated is to not buy, not try, not reply".

[jwenting]

good conclusion, which says it all: infection RATE is far higher in Asia than it is elsewhere, the high US and Euro figures are in no small part because of the far larger number of connected systems in those areas.

That's why the ROK's place in the system is far more worrying than the US's place. With maybe 20% the computers they're pumping out almost the same amount of spam per day.

[robertmarks62]

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[robeyamy]

Wow, incredible

[zeroliken]

If you look at the spam problem from a continental perspective, however, things do improve somewhat for the USA as North America drops to third place behind Asia and Europe. Indeed, North America and Europe together only contribute 35.6 percent of the world's spam content whereas Asia can be thoroughly ashamed of the 50.1 percent it throws around.

Somehow I'm not shocked at these results

[Tim Elsky]

Think of spam and chances are your mind immediately turns to China or Russia and messages about sexual dysfunction or a financial deal you cannot believe.

You know, many of my closer internet friends are from Russia and I never saw that much spam from or around them.
I think this is one of those cold war things, when if something bad is mentioned Russians point to USA and vise versa

[jahnarisha]

I think the stats provided by Sophos is quite distorted. Many of these spammers use rotating proxies or VPNs so anyone from Europe or Asia can appear like sending from U.S. or vice versa. And botnet is just one angle of the spam industry. Email spammers using offshore hosting still account high.

Think of spam and chances are your mind immediately turns to China or Russia and messages about sexual dysfunction or a financial deal you cannot believe. Maybe, though, your thoughts should be closer to home.

I still get alot SPAM from my email account but I usueally deleted or empty it.

It's really hard to pinpoint which countries does send more SPAM.