Europe Grabs the Title of "Top Producer of Spam" For H1-2010

The H1-2010 report released by the security firm Trend Micro revealed that Europe surpassed North and South Americas and the Asia-Pacific region, in terms of spam generation. Europe won the title of "Top Producer of Spam".

Commenting on the issue, the company said that the increase in Europe's spam rate was the result of China's increased pressure on local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to curtail illegitimate activities, as reported by v3 on October 5, 2010. The move has been earlier accredited with reducing malicious activity and driving cybercrooks to operators in Eastern Europe.

Jamz Yaneza, Threat Research Director at Trend Micro said that, although small, campaigns had appeared to make an impact in the overall spam levels, as reported by v3 on October 5, 2010. He further said that was one of the reasons behind the less amount of spam rolling out of China.

He added that after Europe, China is still the biggest.

The report also revealed that spam sustained growth between January (2010) and June 2010, with a short decline during April (2010). As per Trend Micro, Spam now accounts for 97% of all e-mail in circulation. Furthermore, other security firms have same estimates.

According to the report, cybercriminals continue to depend on botnets as main distribution network, because of the speed of spam delivery, the huge target size, and comparatively low costs to the cybercriminal in infecting and compromising a computer.

Trend Micro found in a controlled test that a single infected computer in a botnet network generated more than 2 million spam e-mails in just a day.

Besides, the report highlighted that despite of its source more than 95% of spam in the first quarter of 2010 was written in English. Regardless of general opinion, porn constituted only 4% of all spam. Commercial, scams-based and health/medical categories constituted 65% of the spam generated across the globe, with HTML spam being the most regularly used method by cybercriminals.

Finally, with these facts revealed by the latest report, Trend Micro's security experts recommended users to be more alert as it predicts more attacks in future.

Related article: Europe Rated the Greatest Spam Generator

» SPAMfighter News - 10/7/2010