Spam: China leaves the "dirty dozen"

The anti-virus vendor Sophos has published its quarterly statistics looking at which countries are the origin for the world's spam. Holding top place in the first quarter of 2010, as before, is the United States with a 14 per cent share of global spam, followed by India (7.3%), Brazil (6.8%) and South Korea (4.8%). The biggest change in the list, compared with previous editions, is that China has left the top 12; with only 1.9% of spam coming from there, China has dropped several places in the ranking to fifteenth place. In joint ninth place with Russia and Italy, UK computers send 3.1% of the spam, just below Germany in 6th place with 3.2%.

By continent, Asia leads the rankings producing 33.7% of spam messages, closely followed by Europe at 31.2%. North America is responsible for 16.9% of spam, while South America comes in fourth with 14.7%. According to Sophos, ninety seven per cent of mail volume arriving at companies is now spam with almost all these unwanted messages coming from infected computers operating as spam-bots. "Countries such as the USA would do well to remember that cleaning-up infected PCs in their own back yard will be an important step in fighting cybercrime" said Sophos's Graham Cluley. Unsurprisingly, the anti-virus vendor says this emphasises the need to protect your computer against malware which could turn it into a spam-bot but adds that "we all shouldn't forget that if no-one bought products sold via spam there would be a lot less incentive to send junk email".

(djwm)