US Spews More Spam Than Rest of The WorldAccording to MessageLabs, the level of spam for the United States in June 2008 reached 86% compared to 81.5% for the remaining countries of the world. Moreover, MessageLabs announced the list of ten most spam receiving states in the US. Illinois comes first followed by South Dakota occupying the second place and Oregon occupying the third place. Two other states, New Hampshire comes at fourth and Wisconsin at fifth place in the top ten lists, while Alabama occupies the last position. MessageLabs also indicated that some US states suffer from spam more than other states. Further, different socioeconomic factors influence the spam levels in some particular states and the higher spam levels there is essentially because businesses, employees and consumers do not assign as much priority to IT security as the other states. Moreover, people in these states might be more inclined to share their private information through Internet, increasing the possibility of receiving spam. Also, Internet users in certain states tend to be more inclined to give out their e-mail IDs on Web pages where automated software capture them and include them in the mass e-mail directories. Furthermore, according to MessageLabs, the worldwide proportion of spam in overall e-mail traffic including new and old malicious sources was 81.5%. And, the lowest rate of spam reaching just one state was 78.5%. According to Matt Sergeant, Senior anti-spam Technologist at MessageLabs, the levels of spam are not only increasing but there are also a number of new and varied kinds of spam. Also, the spam mails are being sent out in more targeted bunches and in smaller amounts. In these e-mails, spammers are employing different approaches, from utilizing current events to celebrity names, to draw recipients' attention to abusing conventional hosted services to mercilessly exploit end-users, as reported by ZDNet on July 16, 2008. Sergeant further said that there is possibly a correlation between levels of spam and the number of computers in each state that have succumbed to compromise and added to a spam-spewing botnet, as reported by WebProNews on July 16, 2008. Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay ยป SPAMfighter News - 7/31/2008 |
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