Philippines in Top 30 Spam-Generating Countries

According to the latest report from IT security and management firm Sophos, Asia remains the dominant source of spam mails in the world, as Philippines marks its entry in the top 30 in the list of spam generating countries in the first quarter of 2010.

The report stated that Philippines occupied the 29th place in the list of leading 50 spam circulating countries with a contribution of 0.19%. It followed some other countries of Asia in the list that included India with 7.3%, South Korea with 4.8% and Vietnam with 3.4% at 2nd, 4th and 5th places respectively.

Another report by security firm Symantec revealed that the Philippines stood at the 10th position in APJ region and 4th in SEA for spam relaying, leaving behind Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand.

Spam estimates for an astounding 97% of total mails received by business mail servers, thus pressurizing resources and wasting lot of time to lost productivity. Generally employed for selling bogus goods like fake pharmaceuticals, luxury watches and forged diplomas, all spam usually comes from malware-infected computers (called bots, or zombies) that are managed by hackers.

The security experts informed that users often unknowingly allow their systems to be a part of botnet in many ways, which includes clicking on harmful links that generally carries spam messages that are distributed via botnets.

Besides spam attacks, various other web-based attacks are also widespread in the Philippines. The Symantec's report claimed that the firm has confirmed that the country is the leader for emanating web-based attacks in Southeast Asia.

One important reason for the increased rate of cyber crime in the country is that, unlike other countries of the world, many firms and web users in the Philippines have not adopted efficient security measures.

The security experts have advised that the best way to mitigate such attacks is that user should run anti-spam and anti-malware protection and make sure that all hardware and software are updated with latest security patches.

Related article: Philippines Circulates Spam Accounting for 87% of E-mails

» SPAMfighter News - 5/25/2010