Microsoft’s Researcher Freed China from the Blame of Spammiest Nation

After analyzing all the statistics, Terry Zink, e-mail security researcher at Microsoft, set China free from the tag of "spammiest" country and instead claimed US as the country responsible for generating the highest spam volume, amounting to around a third of all spam e-mails, reported MXlogic on July 21, 2009.

According to Zink, total spam traffic coming from each country might not be a reliable way for determining the extent of a country's "spamminess". Thus, the researcher ranked the nations on the basis of spam per Internet user. He said that this method of ranking normalized the data as it cuts down the chances of a country having large population base to outrank the one with less number of people.

Surprisingly, China is not even among the top 20 spammiest nations according to this ranking, whereas Czech Republic is the number one, at a spam per user rate of 4.38. South Korea, Romania and the Netherlands follow in order. US is at the fifth spot at a spam rate of 2.01.

Zink said that China might be sending large volume of spam, but it is relatively less spammy in comparison of the Eastern European countries. In fact, the top five nations are highly efficient to spam the remaining world as compared to the less developed nations. Further, Zink said that "projected spam count" would be another interesting area of study.

Nevertheless, looking the issue in another way suggests that China is still one of the worst spammers in the world. Project Honey Pot claims that China is hosting the highest number of spam servers. The country appeals the cybercriminals because of its low costs; it costs as lower as $0.15 to buy a domain name in China. Thus, it allows fraudsters to buy as much domain names as they wish at a minimum price.

It is noted that Zink's study opposed the findings of several studies that claimed that China is the leading spam generator. For instance, a study by researchers at University of Alabama stated that a big majority of websites endorsed by means of spam e-mails are hosted at service providers in China that most of the times prefer to overlook complaints and thereby, allowing the illegal activity to prosper.

Related article: Microsoft Patches Live OneCare to Tackle Quarantined E-Mails

» SPAMfighter News - 8/11/2009

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