Africa’s Spam Contribution Continuously Rising

According to the Security Company Symantec's "May 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report" issued on May 27, 2010, a cable was put down under the sea near the eastern coast of Africa during July 2009 that resulted in massive amounts of spam originating from the area.

Commenting on this fascinating discovery, Paul Wood, an analyst at MessageLabs, stated that the adoption of broadband had enabled spammers to increasingly amass bot-infected PCs, as reported by ZDNet on May 27, 2010.

Wood further said that the newly laid cable had facilitated numerous users in acquiring high-speed Internet connectivity and created an immense scope for cyber-criminals to contaminate fresh computers and build new bots.

According to the MessageLabs division of Symantec, Africa's contribution to e-mail junk has increased considerably. During April 2009, approximately 2% of the entire junk e-mail of the globe emanated from Africa. Currently, 3% emanates from this continent. With 120 Billion spam mails dispatched each day, Africa's contribution is an extra 1.2 Billion junk e-mail daily.

It is outlined in the report that online scammers have been abusing the forthcoming '2010 FIFA World Cup.' While the Web surfers search for additional details about their favorite soccer contestants, scammers are attempting to reap benefits through malware distribution via the abuse of the event, Symantec notes in the report.

To cite an example, an attack was recently launched that though camouflaged as a famous US soft drinks brand, actually it had been executed using an IP address based in China's Macau region.

Elaborating this finding of Symantec further, Franz-Stefan Gady, Organizer of a prominent cyber-security conference, stated that approximately 80% of the people in Africa did not even have basic knowledge about IT as a new survey by the World Bank indicated, as reported by Bizreport on May 28, 2010.

Gady added that although there were plenty of cyber-cafes, they often weren't equipped with appropriate anti-virus programs that enabled skilled hackers and botnet operators to easily target the computers there.

Finally, the report informs that the continent sends most spam to Hungary at the rate of 95.4%.

Related article: Africa to Face More Cyber Attacks in 2010

» SPAMfighter News - 6/5/2010