China Moving Fast to Dominate Spam World

Security company McAfee in its new report titled "February 2009 Spam Report" has indicated that China is expected to be an emerging superpower in spam generation. Researchers at the company discovered that the surge in spam mails sent by the Chinese computers increased significantly during January 2009.

Moreover, McAfee researchers state that a fresh pharmaceutical spam campaign originated from Chinese computers in the same month. However, it was not only China that stood out as a spam distributor in January 2009.

As per the report, the US has been the only country with the highest numbers of Internet users and systems that had been converted into zombies for spewing spam. But China Internet Network Information Center states that China is now fast moving to leave behind the US in terms of numbers of spam producers and Internet users.

Jeff Green, Senior Vice President at McAfee Avert Labs, says that although the use of Chinese computers for spam isn't the same as it was in 2008, the resurgence is being observed that will make the country overtake the US, as reported by Vnunet on February 4, 2009. Green added that while cyber criminals were not using the Chinese zombie PCs for spam, one might doubt if there were other activities to which these computers were being put to.

Additionally, the report notes that a large number of computers in China were used to run spam targeting Barack Obama. These e-mails pretended to say that Obama had refused to be a president; thus, enticing users to visit a malevolent site attempting to load malicious software.

Meanwhile, McAfee's facts also support the statistics of another recent report from MessageLabs. Recently, MessageLabs has released a new report "MessageLabs Intelligence: 2008 Annual Security Report" that says China ranks among the five biggest botnet owning countries across the world.

Moreover, with the levels of spam increasing substantially, McAfee researchers suggest that both consumers and businesses must get their program applications and patches up-to-date, at the same time enforce a multi-layered defense system to proactively spot and stop attacks.

Related article: China’s Best Initiatives To Deal With Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 2/19/2009