US Greatest Spam Generator, France & South Korea Significant Producers

According to iCritical, an online security company, the United States continued to be the top spam relaying country during Q1 2009, returning to 37% of spam since a considerable amount of junk e-mails declined during Q4 2008 following the rogue service provider McColo's shut down in November 2008.

The Company also reports that major changes occurred in the List of Top Ten since South Korea climbed up from No.7 to No.4 position, with a 68% increase in spam, while France experienced a huge 86% hike.

Besides, BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are reported as the major hosts for botnets. China, which tentatively steered ahead of the United States with respect to hosting bot-infected PCs during December 2008 after McColo's closure, kept on increasing its volume of spam during January 2009. But it witnessed a significant decline during February-March 2009. Consequently, the United Kingdom claimed the No.2 position in Q1 2009.

Commenting on the discoveries, Andy Calvert, Technical Director at iCritical, stated that these figures reflected a tendency of non-decline in the general rate of spam at the starting of 2009, as reported by DarkReading on April 24, 2009.

Additionally, Calvert stated that the drop in spam levels after the McColo incident highlighted what was possible to accomplish with effective monitoring, while whatever had been done at the sending or the receiving ends was not enough. Accordingly, individual Internet users without proper security were not the lone persons to be condemned. Some high-profile Internet Service Providers (ISPs) allowing such spam to pass were clearly shirking their responsibility off the hazard or weren't sufficiently skilled to control it, Calvert concluded.

Meanwhile, the report observes that India stands much below on the List of Top Ten spam producing nations possibly because the greater part of its IT infrastructure exists within business networks that have stronger security.

iCritical's report explains that there is no direct link between spam and population; for ex - India with a similar number of people like that of China is nowhere close to China's spam levels. Perhaps, the security officials pay more attention to policing incoming e-mails than outgoing messages, the security researchers noted.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 5/6/2009