Oregon – The Third Largest Spam Receiving State in the US

According to MessageLabs, a world communications-security firm, Oregonians receive more junk e-mail than any other states in the US. While Oregon ranks number three, it gets spam in the proportion of 891 per 1,000 e-mails. The state is only behind Illinois, which gets 921 spam mails per 1,000 e-mails and South Dakota, which gets 909.

MessageLabs also revealed that Washington ranks at 45, with spam accounting for 818 per 1,000 e-mails. Montana is last in the series, with just 77% of its electronic mail accounting for spam.

While MessageLabs did not give any specific reason as to why Oregon ranks so high, it said that levels of general awareness of security and some socioeconomic factors play a role in the dissemination of spam.

MessageLabs' Senior anti-spam Technologist, Matt Sergeant, stated that the states experiencing higher levels of spam might not be giving due priority to their overall IT security. Also, there is a possibility that organizations and employees might be increasingly sharing personal information online, as reported by OregonLive on August 7, 2008.

Besides, Sergeant also stated that the availability of e-mail addresses in public domains give spammers opportunities to exploit the situation and send large volumes of spam.

The company further indicated that the levels of spam are rising in the 3 Billion e-mail accounts that MessageLabs scan every day. In June 2008, the world spam reached 81.5% of the total e-mail and US spam hit 8%.

Chief Information Security Officer for Portland State University at Oregon Craig Schiller said that up to 90% of e-mail coming to PSU are spam.

Commenting on the expenditure incurred in the process of scanning, Schiller said that the overhead is huge. Also, the money spends on purchasing the services for filtering and looking for spam prompts forgoing other projects. And for the university, the space to store all the spam that comes in means significant cost of equipment, as reported by OPBNews on August 8, 2008.

Further according to Schiller, other concerns regarding spam involve virus attachments, fraudulent offers as well as spam that compromise the user's e-mail account.

Related article: Organizations Integrating IT Security into Business Agenda

» SPAMfighter News - 8/23/2008