States top spam league

Internet security firm, Sophos has revealed the ‘Dirty Dozen’ countries which top the world league in spam production.

From analysis of all the spam filtered by the company’s global network in the first three months of 2005, the United States topped the list again, exporting an average of 35.70% of all spam during the survey timeframe.

No surprise there, perhaps. Of greater interest were the rest of the rankings, with second spot being taken by South Korea with a total spam export quota of 24.98 per cent.

Taking up the remaining chart placings were:

3. China (incl. Hong Kong) 9.71%
4. France 3.19%
5. Spain 2.74%
6. Canada 2.68%
7. Japan 2.10%
8. Brazil 1.95%
9. United Kingdom 1.57%
10. Germany 1.23%
11. Australia 1.22%
12. Poland 1.20%
Others 11.73%

Although America is responsible for a third of the world’s spam, its percentage total has actually decreased, according to Sophos. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, states: “The percentage of spam sent from American computers has fallen 12% since the start of the year compared to other countries. ISPs enforcing policies to ensure they do not knowingly provide network services to spammers, and a rising awareness of the need to protect all computers from being hacked by spammers has undoubtedly contributed to this trend."

Last month, Sophos reported that more than 50% of the world's spam came from ‘zombie’ computers, PCs that have been covertly hijacked by hackers or virus writers to act as spam email servers.